The recent announcements at MS Ignite around MS Teams were amazing, to see the full post, please read here, but I wanted to call out a few features that are revolutionary for Health Providers.
First off, I know many Health Providers are still asking the question, is MS Teams and Office 365 really secure enough for PHI Data? So I wanted to provide some statistics on how MS Teams is growing to help you feel confident about using MS Teams for clinical collaboration. Take the plunge and join the rest of us in changing the way our clinicians are collaborating around patient care.
Teams is on a roll and is growing in usage every day - Thanks to you!
Allow clinicians to be more productive with powerful new tools for meetings while staying compliant
We announced at Ignite new capabilities to help you stay productive and connected throughout the meeting lifecycle.
- Background blur: Now, all Teams customers can remove distractions and focus your video on what matters most. Why is this important to health providers, well now with background blur a physician can sit in their office or conference room and not worry about patient data on the whiteboard behind them being broadcasted in a meeting. Available today.
- Meeting recording: Meetings are no longer just a point in time experience. With meeting recording in Teams, clinicians can record their daily huddle allowing for other nurses who missed the meeting to playback recorded audio, video and content at any time. Or maybe one Attending needs a consult from a specialist, instead of having to set up a separate meeting with the specialist you can now share the meeting recording and they can watch at their convenience.
- Meeting Transcription and Translation with MS Stream: Anyone who has access to the recording can pull up a transcript, powered by Microsoft Stream, and search for keywords which will optimize your time while getting caught up. Just think, if English is their 2nd language, they can choose to read the transcription in their native language. Available today.
Empower clinical workers with real time schedule updates and shift notifications
MS Teams now has new features that clinical workers or any firstline worker can start taking advantage of today.
- Home is a new mobile experience that allows firstline workers to see at a glance the most important and relevant info for their day. With Home, firstline workers can clock in and out of shifts/breaks, receive important notes for the day or shift, find out who is working during the shift and save time by easily reviewing information and their schedule.
- Shifts enables firstline managers to plan schedules in an employee self-service and integrated experience. They can create, update and distribute schedules for teams as well as broadcast open and unfilled shifts so that other employees can cover them. Finally, they can review and accept time off requests and swap shifts – all from mobile. For firstline employees, they can swap/offer shifts and request time off, right from their phones.
- Already have a scheduling solution but don’t have a great way to get these schedules in the hands of your Clinicians? We have open API where you can keep your backend software for schedules but leverage MS Teams Home view and shifts for their mobile experience.
Home and Shifts features will be available soon in Teams. As we make Teams the hub for teamwork for employees in every role, Microsoft StaffHub was retired on October 1, 2019. Learn more here.
Consolidate Clinician Applications
If you are looking to consolidate the applications your clinicians have to learn or that you have to manage then this is for you. Now with two new secure messaging features with particular relevance in healthcare - image annotation, now generally available, and priority notifications, which will roll out by the end of this year to all Teams commercial customers. These capabilities support HIPAA compliance, and enable clinicians to communicate about patients while avoiding the privacy risks that arise when healthcare professionals use consumer chat apps.
- Image annotation – capture images, annotate, and share them on a secure platform. IT Admins can set policies to prevent images from being stored on a mobile device or local drive.
- Priority notifications– alert the recipient to an urgent message and automatically notify the recipient every two minutes for up to twenty minutes.
We’ve also launched a private preview of care coordination to coordinate patient care, host meetings, and connect the extensible Microsoft 365 platform with Electronic Health Records.
Coordinate patient care using a secure platform
Teams Developer Platform Enhancements
In order to improve the Teams experience for developers, we are announcing the general availability of Adaptive Cards, which provide rich, interactive, and flexible card system that works across Teams, Outlook, Windows, and Cortana.
As shown at Microsoft Build 2018 Adaptive Cards can be used to search and find date in your HER or Supply Chain management system. Clinicians can have powerful data at their fingertips within a few clicks by using the power of MS Teams Developer Planform. For more information on Adaptive Cards see this video.
Secure your data and try the new time-saving tools for admins
Make Information security, Legal and Compliance happy while allowing your users to work confidently knowing that sensitive data is protected
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in Teams will enable you to identify, monitor, and automatically protect sensitive information. With DLP, you can soon create policies directly from the Security and Compliance Center to prevent sensitive information – credit card numbers, social security numbers, or health records – from being shared or leaking unintentionally. Policies will apply to both messages shared in private chat and channel conversations. Files that are shared in channels and private chats will be covered by SharePoint and OneDrive for Business DLP policies. User messages that contain the specified sensitive information will be blocked based on the DLP policy you create with options for the sender to override and send the message and/or report false positives. Stay tuned for more details.
SCC Policy configuration
Sender messaging experience on Teams client
There are many other great items that were announced at MS Ignite just a few short weeks ago, I wanted to call out the ones that can really empower our Health Providers to use these great tools while meeting your primary objectives of, enabling your clinicians to provide the best patient care possible.
I hope you enjoyed this post, please be sure to follow the Microsoft Health and Life Science Blog for more great content.