Modernizing patient and provider experiences with advanced productivity tools

SCL Health: Modernizing patient and provider experiences with advanced productivity and collaboration tools

SCL Health uses Google Workspace and works with partner SADA to optimize patient and provider experiences through more secure, efficient, and integrated productivity and collaboration tools.

Healthcare organizations continue to make tremendous strides when it comes to using the latest technologies to improve how providers work and serve patients. Driven by greater accessibility to advanced tools, evolving patient demands, and more regulatory requirements, providing medical care today is increasingly dependent on access to the latest proven technologies.

Organizations like SCL Health recognize that achieving their goals requires rethinking how healthcare providers and administrators communicate and collaborate, as everyone works together to deliver the highest quality of care as efficiently as possible.

“Creating a culture of transformation and innovation is vital in healthcare. If you want to stand out and better serve employees and communities, you need to think differently. At SCL Health, we see technology as an important driver of our culture focused on innovation.”

Craig Richardville | Chief Information & Digital Officer at SCL Health

Since its founding in 1864 by the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth, SCL Health has been devoted to improving the health of people within the communities it serves. To sustain that mission, SCL Health continues to transform many of its everyday operations, including how its busy teams work together to deliver outstanding patient care. The company’s productivity and collaboration tools are core drivers of delivering outstanding patient care and improving operations. To support its goals, SCL Health selected Google Workspace with the help of Google Cloud Premier Partner SADA.

Making the jump to modern collaboration

When SCL Health began considering updating its collaboration and productivity solutions, efficiency was a chief concern. SCL Health employees were using legacy on-premises solutions with complicated licensing arrangements that regularly required significant resources for maintenance and administration. Furthermore, individual hospitals and facilities had created siloed IT environments that stymied organizational efficiency.

SCL Health staff was limited by workstations and email solutions that were not effective or efficient to work at the pace a modern health organization needs.

With the help of Google Cloud Premier Partner SADA, SCL Health completed its migration to Google Workspace. SADA assisted the company with onboarding, employee adoption, education, and other activities to accelerate SCL Health’s transformation. From associate training and change management guidance to streamlined rollout of the new tools, SADA played a central role in SCL Health’s success at reimagining how healthcare providers and others work on their own and together.

SADA also worked closely with SCL Health leadership to guide larger strategic plans related to the use of Google Workspace. “When it comes to change management, you can’t just send employees an email and hope they know what to do,” says Richardville. “We had a unique and collaborative partnership with SADA throughout the Google Workspace implementation, and continue to partner with them to drive improvement to meet changing needs. SADA has a rare ability to understand the true needs and deliver solutions that work.”

From discovery to implementation, SCL Health had their 17,000 associates up-and-running on Google Workspace within seven months. As a result, they began to see many of the cultural transformations they wanted.

Real-time collaboration yields higher engagement

Since switching to Google Workspace, SCL Health has seen dramatic changes in the ways its associates communicate within and across departments.

“Our reliance on email has dropped exponentially, and that’s all thanks to Chat. It brings much more immediacy to our work, which is a big win for everyone at SCL Health. We’ve greatly reduced the number of emails our associates have to sift through and now enable more real-time, valuable conversations over Chat.”

Craig Richardville | Chief Information & Digital Officer at SCL Health

SCL Health also takes advantage of the instant, collaborative document editing capabilities within Docs and Slides. The more hands-on, direct collaboration reduces the need to send work back and forth over email, which comes with a host of possible delays as well as errors as document versions are mixed up. This can also reduce security risks associated with email attachments.

In addition, Drive now acts as SCL Health’s centralized storage environment, eliminating the need for costly on-premises server maintenance while improving content access, security, and ongoing management.

At the same time, SCL Health benefits from Google Cloud’s commitment to continually enhancing Google Workspace with new capabilities that improve employee productivity. SCL Health also values the highly integrated nature of Google Workspace as opposed to more siloed, standalone tools.

For example, SCL Health employees take advantage of integrations across Google Workspace that make meetings more seamless. Meet is automatically added to Calendar invites and participants can easily join from their devices or from Google Meet hardware in conference rooms. AI built into Google Workspace enables several enhancements, such as prompting Meet participants to join a group chat 10 minutes before the session begins.

“The AI built into Google Workspace enables our associates to more easily navigate the productivity tools they need to do their jobs on a daily basis. It makes life easier for all our teams,” says Richardville. Cost was also a primary concern when choosing a productivity and collaboration suite. SCL Health, like most hospital systems, operates under narrow profit margins in which spend management is critical to keeping the costs of care down. Google Workspace was the best solution to cost-effectively enable advanced, collaborative experiences to SCL Health’s 17,000 associates.

The healthcare provider has also branched out into other Google products and services. SCL Health utilizes Google Voice alongside Chromebooks and Pixel smartphones to deliver telephony services to its associates in a way that untethers them from their workstations. It was the first healthcare organization in the U.S. to provide Pixel devices to all its nursing and other allied health professionals.

The use of Google Voice also allowed SCL Health to decommission many of its expensive landline telephones, empowering employees working on and off site with much greater flexibility to stay mobile without losing connections with each other.

These shifts combine to align SCL Health’s vision for collaboration with the demands of modern healthcare. “The ways that we used to deliver care have changed immensely,” says Richardville. “How healthcare is financed and delivered, the tools we give our providers and patients, the clinical decision support, medical science, education, training, and so much more are changing constantly. Google Workspace enables our organization to keep up with these changes with more modern communication and collaboration.”

Constant improvement and innovation

SCL Health is able to enhance clinical systems, get processes reviewed, and deliver new, more advanced employee experiences and patient care faster thanks to seamless collaboration through the Google Workspace tools it uses.

“Our operational changes have been significant but do not compare to the cultural change that Google Workspace has supported at SCL Health,” says Richardville. “The culture of teamwork and collaboration we have fostered since adopting Google Workspace positions us to excel in the modern age of healthcare.”

With streamlined collaboration and simplified processes, SCL Health is seeing greater enthusiasm across its organization as employees embrace new ways of working. Savings from Google Workspace help SCL Health keep healthcare costs in check while providing patients with highly responsive, modern services.

Google Cloud results

As a result of working with SADA and Google Cloud to migrate 17,000 associates to Google Workspace, SCL Health was able to:

• Reduce collaboration costs while boosting productivity across the organization
• Enable more modern, responsive patient experiences through digital tools
• Improve employee job satisfaction with more intuitive, efficient collaboration tools
• Untether employees from traditional healthcare workstations with mobile devices and collaboration apps

*Google Workspace was formerly known as G Suite prior to Oct. 6, 2020.