Sutter Health moves to Office 365 to help strengthen patient care

Today’s post was written by Wes Wright, corporate CTO for Sutter Health.

In our industry, the less time our employees spend interfacing with technology, the more time they’re able to spend with patients. That’s why my role as the corporate chief technology officer at Sutter Health revolves around one goal: provide nearly 52,000 employees with software that maximizes the amount of time they devote to patient and family care. For a not-for-profit health system as large and diverse as Sutter Health—with 24 acute care hospitals and care centers serving more than 100 communities in California—achieving this goal starts with standardizing IT on a leading-edge communication and collaboration platform. We invested in technology that was intuitive and deeply integrated and are rolling out Office 365 across the organization, a move that ensures we all have the latest version of the same tools to work most efficiently as a whole.

Office 365 impressed us as a standard platform that would take care of many of our unique concerns as a healthcare provider. Chief among these are security and compliance.

Exchange Online has revitalized our unified email service across Sutter Health. With Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection, the built-in security features are scalable and enable our organization to increase our cyber defense and data protection needs, as well as eliminate the need for network drives.

We are excited about the potential of Microsoft Teams and Office 365 Video to facilitate the exchange of innovative healthcare ideas and best practices. I am delighted to see the incredible IT talent at Sutter Health using Microsoft technology to strengthen patient care by keeping us connected. Collaboration is tricky in a dispersed healthcare setting, so when we can simplify dialogue between our clinical and business partners, we expect to see improvements in our delivery of patient-focused care. We are already looking to Office 365 Video as a means of sharing educational videos across the organization and exploring the possibility of extending that capability to patients and family.

Skype Meeting Broadcast is another feature of Skype for Business Online that we’re using to build a sense of unity across our facilities. We turned our quarterly Information Services Conference into a virtual town hall meeting that is attended by more than 2,000 employees. We are looking forward to making Skype available on company smartphones via our Sutter Intune Store. We’ll improve mobility for everyone with our “My Virtual Workspace” project, where we are going to use Intune—part of Enterprise Mobility + Security—to manage some 65,000 mobile devices, so our clinical and business partners can access and use Sutter Health authorized apps anywhere they need to. We expect to see productivity at a whole new level.

For Sutter Health, the direct flow of information and ideas to improve patient care is of the utmost importance. That’s why we’re deploying the Office 365 suite as quickly as possible. It is thrilling to see the incredible synergies that are already strengthening patient care and creating better connections and transparency for our clinical and business partners. We know this will free our employees from their screens and give them more time to spend with patients, ultimately allowing us to provide more of the personalized, high-value health care Sutter Health is known for.

—Wes Wright