Since announcing Box for Healthcare at BoxWorks last year, Box has seen continued growth and momentum in the healthcare and life sciences vertical, working with leading organizations like MD Anderson Cancer Center, Cedars Sinai Medical Center, Dignity Health, Mount Sinai Health System, SSM Health and many more.
Healthcare providers all face similar technology challenges. They run enterprise software for Electronic Health Records (EHRs), Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) and Lab Information Systems (LIS) to name just a few. The IT and security footprint within a typical hospital is a huge budget item. Sharing data within a healthcare enterprise still remains a huge challenge. Providers with multiple facilities require a lightweight and agile collaboration tool that enables information sharing across their workforce, while also keeping Protected Health Information (PHI) safe and secure. Box works with hospitals to provide a secure, content collaboration platform to improve collaboration within the four walls of the hospital as well as connect with external partners, payors and research-based organizations.
How Healthcare Providers use Box
Box supports a wide variety of clinical and administrative workflows across Academic Medical Centers, Integrated Healthcare Delivery Networks (IDNs), hospital chains, community hospitals, large medical groups, Independent Physician Associations (IPAs), and physician practices. Box is used by healthcare providers to:
- Increase Mobility and Support BYOD initiatives: Health systems need to help remote employees connect to critical work content from anywhere. Today, most systems employ VPN which slows down providers and causes them to look for workarounds that result in Shadow IT which leaves hospitals at risk for data loss and leakage. Box provides employees a quick, secure way to access documents from any device and can support a BYOD strategy across the entire enterprise.
- Centralize Clinical Guidelines & Patient Education Materials: Box enables secure workspaces for storing and sharing clinical guidelines, best practices and protocols as well as patient education materials. By creating a central portal that both clinical and administrative staff can access from anywhere on any device, employees can access information quickly from an exam room, at home or at the office.
- Collaborate Externally with Trusted Partners & Third Parties: Box allows employees to securely collaborate and share information with outside trusted partners. The hospital quality team can share quality and patient outcome reports with payors, state reporting agencies, quality organizations, or contracted physician groups. Box also allows hospitals to collaborate on research with external principal investigators, grant researchers and other physicians. This makes academic research, grants or drafting peer reviewed journal articles much easier to edit and review. Whether the person you're working with is inside or outside of your firewall, Box allows for secure real-time collaboration in the cloud.
Box in Action: Summary of Healthcare Customer Presentations from BoxWorks 2015
At our annual user conference, BoxWorks, we featured several Healthcare Roundtables that brought together executives from key healthcare provider accounts to share best practices and hear how they use Box to increase secure collaboration and employee mobility. Our Provider Roundtable included three main panelists: Bill Russell, Chief Information Officer of St. Joseph Health, Craig Guinasso, Chief Security Information Officer of Genomic Health, and Samuel Sayson, M.D., Vice President of Operations of Providence Anesthesiology Associates. Here are some highlights from their presentations:
St. Joseph Healthcare (SJH) an integrated Catholic healthcare delivery system that operates 16 facilities throughout Northern and Southern California, West Texas and Eastern New Mexico needed to share information and collaborate across its 10 distinct communities and 3 different regions. After deploying Box to more than 9,000 employees in less than 5 months, SJH was able to securely collaborate across its various Ministries. Bill Russell, Chief Information Officer at SJH shared that by deploying Box, they have successfully eliminated the use of unsecure file sharing such as USB drives, an over reliance on email attachments and VPN sites. This in turn has mitigated their chance of data loss and breach. Since SJH uses cloud solutions to help "free their data, share their data and apply their data," IT has also integrated Box into its staff portal via an integration with Salesforce.com. To learn more from Bill Russell, check out his Box case study here.
Providence Anesthesiology Associates (PAA) is a group of more than 60 physician anesthesiologists providing patient care to over 100,000 patients each year at 19 locations across North Carolina. In the Boxworks presentation, Dr. Sayson shared how PAA needed to speed up the way they shared best practices on surgeries across the entire practice. He emphasized that any experience during a patient encounter in the operating room needed to be shared immediately and securely as a form of clinical training and improved patient safety. They needed a collaboration platform that was both HIPAA compliant and but would allow physicians to consume content on their mobile devices. This led PAA to Box. Dr. Sayson discussed how they use Box for adverse event management to document and share incident reports, distribute and share critical checklists and inpatient surgery schedules. He also described how Pain Specialists and Physician Assistants use Box Notes while rounding at hospitals to take notes on patient cases. Hear more from Dr. Sayson and other practice leaders here.
Genomic Health the world's leading provider of genetic cancer diagnostic tests needed a secure and easy way to share large amounts of files both internally and externally at their organization. Craig Guinasso, their Chief Security Information Officer spoke at Boxworks about his need to get rid of unsecure file sharing tools such as USB drives, DVDs and email attachments. He also said that employees were constantly complaining about having to VPN into the virtual shared network drives. Genomic Health selected Box as its approved file sharing solution for employees to get access to their files and also share content with customers such as physicians and hospitals. Craig shared that remote employees out in the field use Box on Windows Surface tablets to be able to access the latest marketing materials no matter where they are in the world. Craig is also exploring ways to leverage the Box Platform to deliver patient lab reports to clinicians.
Box is changing the way healthcare providers work by enabling secure collaboration and content sharing across and within facilities. This increases efficiency and productivity as well as increases security. Given the many interoperability challenges in healthcare today, Box helps connect the disparate parties in healthcare to ease information sharing across the care continuum. To learn more about Box for Healthcare, check out the recent webinar we did that shows a live demo for how providers typically use Box.
