AdventHealth is one of the largest nonprofit healthcare organizations in the United States, serving more than five million patients annually, with over 83,000 employees and 51 hospital campuses across nine states.
The Need
As with all large healthcare organizations during the initial surges of COVID-19, AdventHealth needed to adapt certain parts of its operations quickly in order to ensure availability of high-quality healthcare everywhere that required it throughout its considerable multi-state market area.
AdventHealth's Digital Workplace team tapped Camber to build a rapid solution that would help relocate clinical care employees from anywhere within AdventHealth to other locations that were experiencing surges in COVID-19 care needs like testing and hospitalizations.
As an existing Microsoft Enterprise customer, AdventHealth wasn't using the full scope of their Microsoft Enterprise products, but rather the bare minimum out-of-the-box capabilities. This resulted in a number of issues, including lax security protocols, unauthorized data changes, poor error handling, and slow response times. The team was also still bogged down with manual processes such as data uploads, staff communications, and analog team scheduling. They tapped Camber Creative to optimize their Microsoft 365 technology stack and build a custom app to manage hospital surges, mass testing, and staffing challenges.
Challenges
In order for this solution to be effective, it needed to have strict data security and access control policies, rapid and reliable performance, user-friendly error handling, and require as little manual effort as possible for things like data uploads, staff communications, and scheduling.
Because AdventHealth already had mature Microsoft Enterprise architecture, we would need to practice constraints-based design to ensure that our solution was both practical and would not cause a disproportionate amount of rework within other systems and applications that would interface with it.
And of course, all projects have some amount of timeline pressure, but with the nature of the pandemic in the early days, producing a working solution quickly meant faster delivery of care where it was needed most.
Our Role
In just four days, Camber Creative rapidly iterated with a cross-department team at AdventHealth–led by its Digital Workplace team–a Microsoft Enterprise solution where case loads could be reported, shift availabilities could be posted and claimed, employee workloads could be managed, cases of employee illnesses could be reported and enrolled into AdventHealth's remote patient monitoring system, Vivify, and more.
The result is that AdventHealth could redistribute its clinical workforce from anywhere within its sizable market area to handle COVID-19 surges with greater agility than it ever could before.
In the News
AdventHealth's agile response in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic was industry-leading. AdventHealth CEO Terry Shaw appeared on CBS's Face the Nation to talk about the large healthcare organization's COVID-19 response and readiness for the anticipated peak case load.
Hear Mr. Shaw speak about AdventHealth's capabilities, capacity, and plans to combat COVID-19 across their multi-state operations–including a mention of the application Camber built with his Digital Workplace team–in this 6 minute interview.
