Microsoft Teams for Health & Pharma
Microsoft Teams is one of the most popular unified communications as a service (UCaaS) tools worldwide and for a good reason. It provides companies with a seamless way to keep colleagues connected, regardless of where they are or what device they use. It improves collaboration by enabling instant messaging, file sharing, chat, and advanced workflow functions.
Healthcare and pharmaceutical professionals require and deserve advanced tools that empower them to stay connected and provide the best possible patient care. Microsoft Teams for the health and pharma industry boosts clinical efficiency and productivity, enabling healthcare teams to administer superior patient care across the care continuum.
Microsoft Teams makes healthcare delivery more effective, connected, data-driven, and affordable. Here’s how.
Addressing Common Pain Points with Microsoft Teams for Health & Pharma
Healthcare is a highly regulated industry. Strong compliance is mandatory, and security and governance frameworks are a part of all IT processes. In healthcare settings, data is often unstructured and difficult to access. Many digital tools are outdated and lack interoperability, which results in double documentation and overly complex workflows.
To meet the needs of their patients, health and pharma professionals need access to the right data at the right time. They need to communicate across departments and coordinate care across the healthcare system. Microsoft Teams is a modern, intuitive, and security-forward tool that addresses many pain points commonly experienced by healthcare and pharmaceutical entities. It helps to close the technology and connectivity gap that continues to plague the health and pharma industry.
Key Features and Benefits
The health and pharma industry has unique needs when it comes to digital tools. Advanced security and compliance are crucial. The ability to communicate seamlessly, internally and externally, is a must. Microsoft Teams helps healthcare providers increase patient engagement, improve team satisfaction, and enhance productivity.
Microsoft Teams is a single platform with features for all healthcare and pharmaceutical needs. With integrations like Shifts, Outlook, and Calendar, the digital tool unlocks connectivity and boosts effectiveness, ensuring all tasks can be done in one centralized application and location. For the medical industry, Microsoft Teams offers many game-changing features, including secure messaging, care coordination, advanced meeting capabilities, document storage and sharing, electronic health record integration, task management, templates, and more.
1. Enhance connectivity with secure messaging
Microsoft Teams’ secure messaging feature mainly responds to the health and pharma industry’s unique collaboration needs.
In Teams, secure messaging includes:
- 1:1 and group chats: healthcare professionals can chat 1:1 or in groups and collaborate on documents within the chat. If the team members need to review the discussion later, they can easily find it with search and filtering capabilities.
- Priority messaging and read receipts: healthcare professionals can mark messages as Important and Urgent to notify colleagues when a message requires immediate attention. When the sender marks a message as Urgent, the recipient will receive a notification every two minutes for 20 minutes. With read receipts, the sender can check who has read their message.
- Targeted messaging: Healthcare professionals can use tags like title, role, skills, etc., to quickly find the person within the organization with whom they need to communicate. Tags help organizations improve navigation and search.
Microsoft Teams enables the relaying of information quickly and securely. It allows healthcare teams to communicate without worrying about safety and security. All communications are tracked in one place, as opposed to disparate applications.
2. Boost internal meeting flow and streamline workflows
Microsoft Teams enables medical teams to connect whenever, from wherever they are and allows professionals to get together without being physically together in the same place. With audio and video conferencing/meeting features, Microsoft Teams allows healthcare and pharmaceutical professionals to communicate across different departments, units, institutions, and organizations.
Health and Pharmaceutical organizations operate around the clock, and Microsoft Teams does, too. When staff shifts change, priorities evolve, or messages need to be cascaded across the organization, Microsoft Teams ensures seamless, straightforward communications. Teams makes it easy to share announcements across the organization and enables scheduling flexibility and transparency.
With Teams, medical professionals can access many communication channels that help streamline workflows, including chat, voice calling, video calling, and online meetings. Staff can collaborate in one place, in real-time, with SharePoint.
3. Improved workflows, reporting, and automation
Medical professionals can view extensive analytics within the Teams platform to get deep insights into team activities and performance. Team admins can use cross-team and per-team analytics to get an in-depth view of the organization’s teams and understand their efficiency and performance. Organizations can use the detailed information from Microsoft reporting to understand employee usage patterns, which can inform training and communication strategies.
Team templates enable healthcare and pharmaceutical professionals to quickly create teams by providing a team structure of settings, channels, and pre-installed applications. Team admins can create collaboration spaces with predefined settings, channels, and applications. Powell Governance offers a comprehensive gallery of pre-designed Teams templates.
Control the Sprawl with Powell Software
When investing in a new tool, the proper governance and infrastructure must be in place, so the medical teams are set up for success. Avoiding sprawl–the overflow of duplicated and irrelevant data within Teams—is crucial. Sprawl often occurs due to a lack of administrative policies and enforcement around Teams management or a lack of training among employees using Teams. Proper governance policies are essential to reduce sprawl.
Powell Governance helps health and pharma companies simplify Microsoft Teams governance and lifecycle management by providing a set-and-go governance policy that enables easy management of the Microsoft Teams lifecycle.