Medical Center Enhances Communications with New Messaging Infrastructure

UPMC is one of the leading nonprofit medical centers in the U.S. and is closely affiliated with the University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences. Together, their combined mission is to deliver outstanding patient care, train tomorrow’s health care specialists and biomedical scientists, and conduct groundbreaking research to advance the understanding of the causes and course of disease.

UPMC has more than 45,000 employees, 19 hospitals, and a network of facilities and services across western Pennsylvania and overseas. These facilities include physicians’ offices, cancer centers, outpatient treatment centers, specialized imaging and surgery facilities, in-home care operations, rehabil­itation sites, behavioral healthcare locations, and senior living facilities. UPMC also pro­vides one of the country’s fastest growing health insurance plans, offering an array of commercial, Medicare, and Medicaid products.

To keep pace with its growth and the complex demands of the healthcare industry, UPMC has invested significantly in information technology for tasks such as linking and integrating electronic medical records and enhancing research efforts. The organiza­tion’s goal is to pursue quality in all aspects of the organization, from providing the best in patient care to using advanced information technology.

A key part of the UPMC IT infrastructure is its messaging and collaboration system. At the core of this is Microsoft® Exchange Server, which UPMC first installed in 1996. Since then, Exchange Server has proved critical to UPMC operations, providing the core tech­nology for employees to communicate and collaborate on documents. By 2006, a decade after it first deployed Exchange Server, UPMC had more than 28,000 mailboxes in use, and in early 2007 the organization migrated to Exchange Server 2007. UPMC uses the Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 messaging and collaboration client, with the organization planning a migra­tion to the 2007 Microsoft Office system by late 2007.

Mark Longwell, Manager of Systems Support for UPMC, says Exchange Server 2007 has been critical in supporting e-mail communi­cation for a large and growing user base, with between 300,000 and 400,000 incoming messages being handled every day. The user base is also becoming more mobile; currently, more than 300 employees—mostly physicians—use mobile hardware (including devices that run Windows Mobile® software) to check e-mail and to access documents when they are away from their desks. While this capability helps improve the efficiency of users, it also poses risks for the organization if mobile devices are lost or stolen.

Users are also relying more and more on Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access, an Exchange Server feature that works through any Web browser to allow access to e-mail and to Exchange Server public folders, which are used by individuals for sharing docu­ments and by departments for collaborating on projects. Examples of the range of infor­mation contained in UPMC’s Exchange Server public folders include documents pertaining to particular patient cases, collaborative efforts on research projects, human resources documentation, scheduling, and departmental communications such as memos and announcements.

With the importance of Exchange Server in the organization, Longwell and his IT colleagues anticipated the value that an updated version of the server software would deliver to UPMC. 

UPMC became an early adopter of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1), deploying the prerelease version of the soft­ware in August 2007. Exchange Server 2007 SP1 provides UPMC with updates and improvements to the server software, including new language support for Microsoft Office Outlook Mobile, new capabilities for the Outlook Web Access spelling checker, a larger text entry field, search folder support, and improved menu navigation for the Office Outlook Mobile user interface.

Exchange Server 2007 SP1 also provides updated administrative functions for UPMC IT staff, such as the ability to consolidate mailbox sites onto fewer, centralized server computers for easier management, and the ability to manage Exchange Server 2007 remotely from a desktop computer with the Exchange Management Console. The UPMC IT department is using the new Exchange Management Shell, which provides a rich, flexible scripting environment that reduces the complexity of creating scripts and makes it easier to perform tasks in bulk, and also provides a graphical user interface (GUI) for users who prefer a GUI environment for performing their jobs.

Exchange Server 2007 SP1 will also be used to provide UPMC with standby continuous replication (SCR), where e-mail data is con­tinuously copied to a server that is located in a secondary data center and that is manually activated in an event when the organization’s primary data center is inaccessible.

UPMC has improved its communications and collaboration capabilities by deploying Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1. Mobile users are reporting positive experiences with Office Outlook Web Access and Outlook Mobile. The IT staff has better control over mobile devices, including the ability to require users to create complex passwords that protect mobile devices in the event that they are lost or stolen. The enhanced Exchange Server also delivers better administrative tools that are helping the IT staff manage the communication and collaboration system more effectively.

Improved Anywhere Access
The enhanced Outlook Web Access in Exchange Server 2007 SP1 has improved access to e-mail and public folders for UPMC users who are traveling or away from their desktop or portable computers running Office Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007.

Longwell says the new and improved features in Outlook Web Access have definitely improved the user experience, with a new monthly calendar view, easy recovery of deleted items, personal distribution list editing functionality, and a new rules editor and wizard.

“We have gotten a lot of positive feedback on the new Outlook Web Access,” Longwell says. “The enhanced Outlook Web Access is becoming increasingly important as people travel or are simply more mobile around hospitals and other facilities. With Outlook Web Access, they can easily log on to their e-mail accounts from any Web browser, and have an experience that is very much like working in the Office Outlook client.”

He adds that easier access through Outlook Web Access to Exchange Server public fold­ers is also important. “The Exchange Server public folders play an important role in communications and collaboration, and the enhanced Outlook Web Access in Exchange Server 2007 SP1 makes it easy to access public folders from any device with a current Web browser,” he says.

Better Security for Information
New and enhanced security features in Exchange Server 2007 SP1 are helping UPMC improve the security of information, especially confidential information that is transmitted over mobile devices.

“Privacy regulations in our internal policies are very restrictive regarding the transmission of patient records, but there may be situa­tions where sensitive information is dis­cussed in e-mail messages, including over mobile connections,” Longwell says. “The features that are available in Exchange Server 2007 SP1 and delivered through Exchange ActiveSync® technology, such as adding encryption, requiring complex pass­words, and remotely managing mobile devices—including remotely wiping data if needed and a confirmation that the data is wiped—provide extra layers of security in the event that mobile devices are lost or stolen.”

Greater Administrative Efficiency
Longwell notes that the Exchange Manage­ment Console—which combines all manage­ment tasks into one user interface and lets UPMC IT staff easily manage all of the organ­ization’s messaging servers, recipients, and organizational components—is benefiting the IT department. UPMC administrators also benefit from the combination of command-line shell and GUI environments provided by the Exchange Management Shell and Exchange Management Console.

“I personally like to do a lot of administration from the new task-based command-line shell in Exchange Server 2007 SP1,” Longwell says. “But a lot of the IT staff members are used to GUI-based consoles. The fact that we have both of these types of interfaces in Exchange Server provides the best of both worlds. I like the command-line console because there is additional functionality such as refined searches. But the GUI-based console shortens the learning curve for IT administrators who are used to working in that environment.

“Exchange Server 2007 SP1 is easy to deploy [and] easy to use, and it’s delivering time and money savings through enhanced administra­tive functionality,” concludes Longwell. “Over­all, the features in Exchange Server 2007 SP1 make it faster and easier for our IT staff members to work, and it’s providing a rich environment for increased use by mobile employees.”