Fraser Health (FH), the largest of six health authorities within the BC Health sector, has a broad mandate to support the health and wellbeing of nearly 2 million British Columbians from the Fraser Canyon to Burnaby. Nearly 40,000 people (staff and volunteers) work in Fraser Health. Employees working in clinical and corporate roles use a diverse and vast collection of technologies to perform their work.

As the healthcare landscape is rapidly evolving, fueled by the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on work, Fraser Health had to start a deep workspace transformation journey.

CHALLENGES

Like most public service organizations, Fraser Health had legacy platforms and a technical debt that kept growing. They were using a mix of manual processes, SharePoint, and Skype for Business to engage with their staff, patients, and vendors.

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, it became obvious that their systems required improvement to support working remotely. It was high time to modernize their platform and applications to adjust to the new normal and most importantly be prepared to meet the demands on the health care sector.

Fraser Health decided to adopt Microsoft 365 because of its numerous benefits to allow remote healthcare. In that regard, Microsoft Teams was selected as their preferred collaboration and communication platform thanks to its integration with other apps – i.e., PowerApps, Power BI, Bookings, clinical application integration, etc.

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SOLUTION

Softlanding started the foundational work of this multi-phased journey in 2019, in the middle of the pandemic, by setting up the components required for M365 workloads to enable the modern workplace.

Rapid Teams Deployment:

  • Established hybrid identities with Azure AD to enable staff to access applications both on-premises and in the cloud
  • Microsoft Teams assessment: functional, desktop and overall readiness
  • Office 365 guardrails configuration for security & compliance
  • Deployment of Microsoft Teams client
  • Organization Change Management stream: Implementation of Hypercare during the onboarding phase, leveraging BOT framework for self-service Q&A with ongoing optimization
  • Created and deployed application protection policies

Strategic Roadmap for Exchange Online and SharePoint Online migration

This foundational work led Fraser Health to continue its digital transformation journey and embrace virtual care. Several virtual patient care pilots were implemented including the integration of Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Bookings App and PowerApps to schedule virtual visits. Additional pilots included Teams secure messaging, Teams Virtual Rounding and Dapasoft’s Corolar Virtual Care (CVC) solution which integrates natively with Team’s for acute care providers to rapidly launch virtual clinics.

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RESULTS

  • Deployment of Teams over 30,000 endpoints and 40,000 users within eight months (February 2020 – Sept 2020)
    • 75% of onboarded users (32,451) have been using MS Teams since June 30, 2020
    • Chat messages: 755,743
    • Meetings organized: 23,919
    • Meeting participants: 89,312
  • Conducted limited production release of Virtual Visit solution for Neurology Clinic with 9 physicians using Teams, Booking Application and Exchange Online
  • Conducted limited production release of Secure messaging for 3 clinics consisting of 12 physicians

“At a time of uncertainty when the pandemic started, we learned what it meant to have trusted partners in Microsoft and Softlanding. In conjunction with PHSA Technical Services, all the organizations worked at what felt like record speed to stand up services quickly and get our users tools to support remote work. This work has laid a strong foundation for our Collaboration Workspace Transformation program, allowing us to pivot easily to the many offerings within the Office 365 platform as well as allowing us to dive into virtual visit and clinical support use cases which is very exciting space for us as an organization moving forward.” Dillon Brar, Portfolio Manager, Collaboration Technologies at Fraser Health Authority

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Fraser Health

“With the support of Microsoft and Softlanding, we were quickly able to meet the remote collaboration needs that presented during the first months of the pandemic. Their guidance, allowed us to remain focused on building a long-term modernization strategy and roadmap, while being able to respond to immediate needs of the organization. We are now well on our way of unleashing the power of the Microsoft 365 platform, and laying the groundwork for the other BC Health Authorities to do the same. With this work, we will be able to truly transform the way that work is being done within Fraser Health, and ultimately improve delivery of services to our community”

Kevin Stevens, Portfolio Manager at Fraser Health Authority

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