In today’s post we hear from Baycrest Hospital on why extending their use of Microsoft Office 365 and SharePoint Online was the best decision for their business as they embrace cloud computing!

“By openly sharing best-in-class electronic forms and e-learning modules, healthcare institutions can save weeks—and even months—of time… It’s all about sharing resources and saving public taxpayer dollars.”

--Terrie Tucker, Director of eHealth, Baycrest

Baycrest Hospital
Baycrest Hospital, based in Canada, is a global leader in developing and providing innovations in aging and brain health. It provides care to more than 2,500 frail and active seniors every day in outpatient and inpatient programs and residential settings.

IT Challenges
Baycrest wanted to share information more effectively. Healthcare providers wasted a lot of time sending draft policies, presentations, and other documents back and forth to their coworkers, and then searching for these documents later when they needed them. Baycrest employees decided they could save time by putting these documents on a centralized healthcare portal that anyone could access.

Baycrest worked with Microsoft Partner Network member Orangutech, an information technology company and system integrator based in Ottawa, Canada, to create a web-based healthcare portal called eHealth2Share. Baycrest had recently adopted Microsoft Office 365, which delivers familiar Microsoft Office collaboration and productivity tools through the cloud.

IT Solution and Benefits
Baycrest and Orangutech decided to build the portal using the document sharing service Microsoft SharePoint Online, a component of Office 365, and host it within Microsoft data centers as a cloud service. Developing the portal as a cloud service using Microsoft software made it possible for Baycrest to create eHealth2Share quickly and at low cost. Building a cloud-based portal also provided an affordable way for Baycrest to share resources with other healthcare institutions. With eHealth2Share, healthcare organizations can save time and lower development costs by as much as 90 percent by downloading software applications and electronic forms that other institutions have already produced.

By subscribing to the portal for $500 per year, healthcare providers can share a broad range of information both within the organization and with colleagues at other healthcare institutions. To access eHealth2Share, healthcare workers simply pay an affordable annual subscription fee. They can then access documents such as policies, procedures, presentations, templates, and best practices, whenever they need them. They can also download software applications, electronic forms, and employee training modules already produced by other healthcare organizations. Additionally, they can request participation in private discussion forums in which members share information on specific healthcare subjects. Baycrest started working on eHealth2Share in early 2011. The portal took less than two months to develop and went live in June 2011.

Read the full story here.