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Government and Health IT Group Promotes Best Practices via Online Collaboration Solution

  • Artigo

Governments and public organizations are making the move to cloud computing, realizing the immense benefits that it has to offer. In today’s post we hear from the SERCH on why Microsoft was the best decision in their move off Google Groups and in embracing cloud computing!

“SharePoint Online is so valuable as an ongoing repository of resources and information for the group. If someone manages to get something finished and approved, sharing that achievement is incredibly important.”

Emily Passino, Senior Management Consultant, State of Tennessee, SERCH

In February 2009, the 111th United States Congress under President Obama enacted the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, an economic stimulus package intended to create jobs and foster investment, and worth approximately U.S.$787 billion. The responsibility for allocating and managing healthcare technology incentive funds under the Recovery Act falls to federal agencies within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, including the Office of the National Coordinator in Health and Human Services, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and the state governments. CMS Region IV consists of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, and Tennessee. In April 2010, approximately 40 key stakeholders from 11 states formed the South East Regional Collaborative on HIT-HIE (SERCH) group to work together to administer funding for health IT and electronic health records under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Their goal was to bring some consistency and order to management of new incentives for health information technology.

Government IT Challenges
SERCH is working to consider common regional solutions for HIT-HIE, solve cross-border issues, and pool resources to stretch limited dollars. The group focuses on knowledge sharing, coordinating resources across grant programs within and between the states, and aligning program and policy decisions. While SERCH holds weekly conference calls to address hot topics and provide a forum for open discussions about issues, policies, and new regulations from the federal government, it quickly became clear that the group needed a more formal mechanism to share documents and to build a knowledge repository for everyone to use as a convenient reference. “We had no way to share information efficiently,” says Passino.

At first, a member of SERCH suggested using the online collaboration services from Google Groups, and the rest of the group agreed. However, as SERCH grew to approximately 185 people and more and more documents were uploaded, members reported that using Google Groups to handle the growing number of documents was getting unmanageable. In addition, some of the members were unfamiliar with the Google interface and resisted having to learn something new. Also, they found that Google Groups was discontinuing support for the Pages and Files features.

Solution and Benefits
In one of the weekly SERCH conference calls, a participant recommended Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS).  “We had already talked about Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as a collaboration platform for SERCH because everyone was familiar with the functionality,” says Kapoor. “We discussed whether SERCH could use a state’s existing Office SharePoint Server environment. But we are all volunteers with busy day jobs, and no one wanted to take the responsibility of having the SERCH group hosted in their own SharePoint Server infrastructures. So a cloud-based version of SharePoint was ideal.”

SERCH implemented a 90 day trial of BPOS and ended up purchasing 120 licenses for the solution. “We have ten folders in the main, shared document space that contain a total of approximately 100 documents,” says Passino. “Most are in the public domain but they are key documents, such as approved, strategic plans and provider directories that everyone needs to see, all in one central location.” SERCH members are also accessing SharePoint Online for contact lists, links to important websites, weekly meeting minutes and agendas, event planners, shared calendars, and frequently asked questions.

For SERCH, the rapid deployment, low cost, and ease of use provided immediate ratification for the group’s decision to move to a Microsoft cloud-based solution instead of staying with Google. Furthermore, now that SERCH members can go to the document library on SharePoint Online to quickly find information they need, everyone is getting work done more quickly—an invaluable benefit for busy professionals. “Microsoft SharePoint Online is potentially one of the most useful collaboration tools SERCH has at its disposal,” says Passino. “The site is a collection of documents and websites that members think are key to our efforts, so we can get directly to the data we need. It’s a great way to deal with ‘information overload.’”

Read the full case study.

Please comment on your collaboration needs for government.

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