How Healthcare organisations can use Microsoft Teams to accelerate digital transformation

Microsoft Teams in Healthcare 

Healthcare professionals strive to provide the best possible care for their patients, and Microsoft Teams can enable them to achieve that. 

Empowering your care team is not only about storing patient information in one place. It’s about being able to communicate and collaborate in a single secure place, integrating data, clinical systems, apps, and EHRs.

Microsoft Teams offers chat, video, voice, and healthcare tools in a single hub that supports compliance with HIPAA, HITECH, and other regulations.

The tools available enable your care team to share knowledge easily and securely with advanced messaging features, including priority notifications, smart cameras, and message delegation. 

They can boost personal productivity and coordinate more efficiently with colleagues, both inside and outside your organisation. They can also align the activities of clinical personnel to deliver patient-centric care, applying the expertise of multidisciplinary teams and surfacing relevant insights.

Enhanced collaboration

Above all, Microsoft Teams enables doctors, clinicians, nurses, and other staff to communicate and collaborate more efficiently.

You can set up teams and channels for your healthcare professionals and information workers. They will be able to use channels with tabs as a way to structure their work. These tabs integrate cloud data to help them access and manage the information they need or use the most.

Your health team can set up meetings, or use channel meetings, enhanced by Teams audio, video, screen sharing, recording, and transcription features. 

So, for example, they can gather data from all sources, including remote devices, to provide timely alerts, interventions and personalised treatment plans.

Teams is also a great way to store and share files and documents. Your health team becomes part of a single virtual team that can work and collaborate seamlessly on patient and administrative information.

Teams works for everyone

The beauty of Teams is that it is a consistent solution for the entire health organisation. Doctors can connect with the people and information they need, whether it’s across your care teams or health systems, through a multidisciplinary team (MDT) meeting, or while on the go. 

Nurses can orchestrate resources and care across departments, digitise clinical workflows, and enable coordinated care with instant access to people and patient information.

Administrators can securely communicate with clinicians and all hospital staff, sharing important announcements across the organisation, and collaborating in one place.

IT professionals can give clinicians and staff a secure and compliant way to communicate and collaborate with built-in manageability features like eDiscovery, audit reports, and data loss prevention. 

It’s well worth taking a look at some of those benefits in a little more detail.

Video conferencing set to continue

Video conferencing is something most of us have got used to with the remote working practices introduced during the pandemic. Some of the habits picked up during the last year are set to stick, and this is sure to be one of them. 

Video conferences at the beginning of a shift can provide a convenient replacement for the old stand-up meetings, particularly as many team members are still dotted around different locations. Better still, these meetings can be recorded for absentees and played back on demand.

Your teams can conduct audio or video meetings across a range of devices with anyone inside or outside of your organization. They can consult with remote clinicians—such as specialists—and engage in meetings between healthcare professionals across departments, units, and your entire network.

A digital whiteboard for meetings and online shared minutes works well, but you can also benefit from features like online polls to test the feelings of the clinical and nursing teams on a wide variety of issues.

Targeted communication

Your health workers will be able to improve the hand-off of patient information, streamline care with Microsoft Lists, and tailor Microsoft Teams with healthcare templates. They can have persistent conversations about different patients needing attention, communicating through chat and messages.

Knowing who is on shift and being able to reach them at the right time is key to delivering timely patient care. (Valuable time can be wasted trying to identify the correct contact information for healthcare staff members.) 

Currently, with targeted communications in Teams, you can create tags to organise users based on attributes such as a role, skill, or location. Once applied you can message everyone assigned to a tag at the same time in a chat or channel conversation: for example, you can message all @Orderlies in a ward.

Provide secure messaging for the care team

Secure communications are vitally important for your organisation. Send messages, capture and share images, and relay urgent information knowing that Microsoft Teams supports the enhanced security and compliance requirements for healthcare.

Built on the Microsoft 365 cloud, Microsoft Teams helps enable HIPAA compliance and also supports standards like Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST), Service Organization Controls (SOC) 1 and 2, and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Offer seamless virtual health experiences for patients

As well as enhancing collaboration and communication with colleagues, you can, of course, expand patient care with virtual visits in Microsoft Teams. 

Video conferencing provides a way for clinicians to provide high-quality, personalised, and affordable consultations. Using the complete meetings platform in Microsoft Teams, combined with the new Bookings app in Teams, providers will be able to schedule, manage, and conduct virtual visits with patients, such as a surgery follow-up.

Introducing the Resonate Teams for Health package

Resonate’s Teams for Health package can help your workgroups and individual care staff access all the benefits of Microsoft Teams, quickly and efficiently. 

At Resonate, we help organisations in the healthcare sector increase their operational agility and serve their patients better by leveraging the investment in O365 and Microsoft Teams. These platforms provide a single interface, such as a mobile phone, for communication, collaboration and access to key data sources.

Extensive healthcare experience 

With first-hand experience, we understand how important it is for healthcare organisations to bring their people together in the most seamless way possible. 

This is where working with a Microsoft partner that truly understands the technology and the needs of the healthcare sector pays dividends. 

We offer great features like instant Approvals. Using instant messaging, nursing staff or junior doctors can seek approval from senior staff for certain activities in APP. Team leaders can assign or reject authorisation and this can be recorded within the appropriate Teams channel. 

Introducing Teams instant messaging allows for the sharing of videos, photographs and short messages for better collaboration around incidents and patient situations.

Understanding the needs of distributed teams across multiple locations, working at both health centres or remotely, and building a digital ecosystem with its associated processes, policies and training requirements can be a real challenge. Choosing the right partner for this journey is critical.

Beyond all that, Resonate Teams Voice can bring all your collaboration, including voice, onto a single platform that is fully accessible remotely. 

If you would like to find out more about what Resonate could do for your healthcare organisation, book a call with one of our sector specialists here.