“This portal can give our physicians assisting in rural areas worldwide access to the same medical literature that we use here at St. Joseph Heritage Medical Group. That has to increase the quality of care.” Michael Gilbert, MD, Associate Medical Director and Informatics Officer, St. Joseph Heritage Medical Group St. Joseph Health System was early in giving its physicians online access to basic patient information. But as its doctors came to expect easy access to medical content, applications, and elec- tronic medical records, St. Joseph Health System needed a broader solution. That solution: an integrated portal based on Microsoft technology that boosts physician productivity and collaboration while enhancing patient satisfaction and the quality of care. Business Needs A decade ago, St. Joseph Health System began operating a web portal for physi- cians called Physician Connect. The move gave the physicians of the U.S.$4.1-billion- a-year, 14-facility, nonprofit organization unprecedented access to their daily patient lists and to vital statistics associated with those patients. Physicians got a running start to their day that made them more productive and enhanced the quality of care that they could provide to patients. As technology improved and physician expectations increased, St. Joseph Health System provided its physicians and other staff with more ways to connect electron- ically to the healthcare organization. The use of electronic medical record systems in hospitals and medical groups grew. Over time, portal users wanted access to those systems remotely. That created new challenges. Citrix Secure Access Manager provided remote access to applications, while the portal provided access to patient information, requiring physicians to log onto and continually switch between both. Separate logons also added to the time and trouble of gaining access to multiple applications. Separate back-end databases made it difficult to gain comprehensive information without jumping among applications. Solution To address these concerns, St. Joseph Health System envisioned a new, more comprehensive portal. The new portal would provide physicians with security- enabled, internal, and remote access to the specific applications and information for which they were authorized. It would provide fresh medical content targeted to their specialties. And it would make all this available through a single logon, to make the portal convenient for physicians to use. To validate their concept, St. Joseph Health System technologists and clinical stakeholders went to a two-day Architecture Design Session at the Microsoft Technology Center in Irvine, California. “Microsoft got us through the first chunk of our product life cycle,” says Jeff Allport, Vice President of IT, St. Joseph Health System. “In two days, we had a project plan that would have taken us six months to produce on our own.” St. Joseph Health System realized its vision by building on its existing infrastructure and adopting Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Citrix Web Interface for SharePoint to create Physician Connect Gen2. One of the innovations of the new Office SharePoint Server 2007–based portal was to use Active Directory Domain Customer: St. Joseph Health System Website: www.stjhs.org Customer Size: 24,000 employees Country or Region: United States Industry: Healthcare Customer Profile Based in Orange, California, St. Joseph Health System is an integrated healthcare delivery system with 14 acute-care hospi- tals, home health agencies, hospice care, outpatient services, skilled nursing facili- ties, community clinics, and physician organizations. Software and Services Microsoft Office − Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Microsoft Amalga − Microsoft Amalga Unified Intelligence System Services − Microsoft Technology Center Technology − Active Directory Domain Services For more information about other Microsoft customer successes, please visit: www.microsoft.com/casestudies Microsoft Customer Solution Healthcare Industry Case Study Healthcare Provider Prescribes Integrated Portal to Boost Productivity, Quality of Care