Cornerstone Medical Corners IM Tracking to Improve Productivity and Patient Satisfaction

Background

Cornerstone Medical Care (www.cmcb.com) is an internal medicine practice with offices in Brandon and Sun City Center, Florida. Physicians also have privileges at both Brandon Regional Hospital and South Bay Hospital, for urgent and emergency care 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.  Cornerstone provides patients with a full range of comprehensive health services with electronic medical records to ensure efficiency and accuracy, while maintaining the highest standards for the privacy and security of your health records

Challenges – Cornerstone adopted Microsoft Lync about 2 years ago and like many users, quickly discovered there was no easy way to search IM conversations.  As a healthcare provider, Cornerstone is required to keep and protect all internal communications. While Lync captures and archives the chat, it does not provide visual display or reporting tools to present the data in a meaningful way. Additionally, Cornerstone wanted a view of IM traffic for analyzing staff productivity. For example a spike in usage acts as an alert to a potential patient service or human resource issue that demands attention.

Solution – Jason Ferenczy-Zumpano, Practice Administrator for Cornerstone Medical Care, participated in the Instant Technologies beta test program for the HR Auditor (HRA) product, designed specifically to search, view and export Lync IM chat conversations. Ferenczy-Zumpano appreciates that HRA provides a visual display of IM chats by date, time, user or keyword and not just a text output of a specific chat session. “HRA is well-conceived and provides a complete search tool but equally valuable for us is the ability to look at overall IM usage across the practice, not just targeting certain communications,” Jason noted.

Cornerstone uses Instant Technologies HRA to monitor conversations and productivity of 55 staff members. After deployment, IM chat quickly surpassed internal email use but without the ability to monitor IM in real-time, it was difficult to track how it was being used. Ferenczy-Zumpano explains, “We like to keep a pulse on what is going on in the practice, and with our other communication channels (like email and contact center) we are able to view usage and shadow terminals, but we did not have this insight with IM.” With the help of HRA, Cornerstone initially determined that 50% of IM is used for work and 50% for social chat, after 6 months of using HRA and as a direct result of monitoring, non-business chat use of IM was reduced to below 5%. It is further helpful to track IM use by Microsoft Active Directory (AD) group to help set benchmarks by job role– physicians, physician assistants (PA), billing staff, and management.

Bottomline – Jason also added, “I find HRA is a great management tool for both IM compliance in healthcare and usage monitoring. For us it’s not just about reporting after the fact, it is important to have insight into our internal communications to get in front of potential issues.”  This is a great recommendation on how HRA brings critical visual acuity for monitoring and eDiscovery and compliance in the healthcare environment.

Background - HR Auditor for Microsoft Lync® is an eDiscovery tool that allows you to search, view and export Lync IM conversations within your existing archive database.

Key features include:

- Perform basic and advanced searches by keywords, dates, and users

- Export conversations to .pdf, .csv, or .txt files

- Install in less than 30 minutes with no technology upgrade

Seamless installation means authorized users are up and running quickly. The intuitive design offers advanced search functionality with rich visual display

Key benefits include:

- Cost effective, complete solution for managing eDiscovery and compliance requests

- Designed to enable non-technical users to perform searches

- Streamlined installation and quick search honors time restraints on high demand IT professionals

For more information visit – www.tryhrauditor.com