The Elisabeth-TweeSteden Hospital (ETZ) is a top clinical teaching hospital and trauma center with three locations in Tilburg and Waalwijk. By 2020, ETZ’s e-mail environment needed to be replaced. The Exchange 2013 environment was end of life and the physical hardware was also in need of replacement.
ICT challenges in healthcare: more with less
Dennis Groen, senior project manager at ETZ: “As a hospital, we want to continue to provide future-proof care. There is a strong growing need, which we have to fill with the same capacity. So that’s a big challenge. We are constantly looking at how technology can help support the care process and how we can use ICT to make the work for our colleagues as easy as possible.”
The choice of Exchange Online and Microsoft 365
ICT consultant Franz Steinhauser: “Our starting point is: if parts of the ICT are essential for the care we provide, then it will not go to the cloud. For all other ICT, we are looking at opportunities to purchase it as a service. The complexity of the underlying infrastructure is constantly increasing, and things like technical management are not the focus when it comes to systems that are not essential to our primary process: providing exceptional care. So the combination of Exchange Online and Microsoft 365 was a logical choice for us. For example, like many other organizations, in corona time we had to do a lot more working from home and video calling. The fact that applications such as SharePoint and Teams are an integral part of Microsoft 365 was further confirmation of our choice.”
The collaboration with PQR
ETZ made a call to a number of Microsoft partners to migrate to Exchange Online. After careful evaluation, PQR was chosen. Franz Steinhauser: “PQR had the best and most complete proposal. In addition, we already had a close cooperation with PQR in a number of previous projects, so they know our organization very well. Of course, we also look critically at costs, and due to the shorter lead time, PQR’s proposal also stood out on the cost side.”
Dennis Groen: “This project was supervised from PQR by a lead consultant and from ETZ we put together a project team. In it, the most important ICT disciplines that interface with the Exchange environment were represented: specialists in areas such as infrastructure, firewalls, antivirus and, of course, e-mail.”
Special approach
Because the migration took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, remote cooperation was required. Dennis Groen: “We decided to consult every day through Teams. That worked extremely well. If you share every day where you stand, what the ongoing actions are and what you are running into, you keep all disciplines in sync and any problems are solved very quickly. In addition, it provided space for informal contact. These factors made for incredibly close collaboration and rapid progress. A great example of how you can switch gears very quickly online and work together perfectly.”
Benefits
The adoption of Exchange Online and Microsoft 365 offers ETZ a number of important benefits. Due to migrations and mergers, the hospital had a fragmented license portfolio, which was optimized cost-wise in collaboration with PQR.
Franz Steinhauser: “We see these benefits in several areas. Our functional Exchange administrators have become more productive because they no longer have to do technical management of the Exchange software and servers. In addition, we have been able to consolidate a number of applications. For example, we were using a separate application for video consultations, which we were able to phase out thanks to Teams. Linking Teams with Outlook calendars increases the speed and efficiency of employees in meetings.”
The experience with PQR
Frank Goverde: “Everything is now running to complete satisfaction. The migration has gone superbly, actually even better than expected. We did experience some delays here and there due to corona, and determining policy aspects for our new environment.” Senior IT specialist Pedro van Vliet adds: “PQR’s consultant Marcel van Klaveren helped us tremendously with this. Not only does he have a lot of technical knowledge, but his availability and commitment were outstanding. He always responds quickly, even after completion of the project.”
Franz Steinhauser: “The pleasant and informal cooperation is typical of PQR. But it was also surprising how quickly they can bring in additional colleagues when needed. We didn’t really realize beforehand how complex our e-mail environment actually was. Some colleagues used mailboxes in very creative ways, so it took a long time to migrate them. You run into that kind of legacy in the project, but we had the advantage of having PQR on board. They were able to think about the solution right away. My experiences are completely in line with the awarding of the contract to PQR: the good feeling was realized during the project.”
Dennis Groen: “We did a health check with Microsoft afterwards on the PQR design of our new environment and it scored really well. I experienced it as a nice project.”
Marcel van Klaveren, lead consultant at PQR adds, “I took on this project with a team of driven people at ETZ. We pulled together like magnets and really helped each other to keep it running. As a result, we ended up getting more done than the original scope of the project specified. As far as I am concerned, this is great proof that if you put all the top people together, you excel in quality.”
Next steps
Dennis Groen: “Now that the project has been handed over to management, we as an organization are looking at what functionality of Microsoft 365 we can embrace even more. ETZ wants to take maximum advantage of digital technology. The aim is to support our healthcare processes as well as possible with ICT in a way that is friendly to both employees and patients. PQR has laid a perfect foundation for this.”
Franz Steinhauser adds: “In addition, we are looking for ways to make more use of our new Microsoft environment from a technical and functional perspective. We use SharePoint throughout the organization and expect to make huge gains when we move to OneDrive and SharePoint online.”
Do you have questions about workplace optimization or other questions about (hybrid) cloud, security or networking? Contact PQR.