Physician Partner Pages

This project raised the efficiency and effectiveness of Physician interface and connectivity support services by consolidating, animating, and optimizing the utility of cross-team knowledge through integrated and web-accessible Wikis, Lists, and Document Libraries.

Overall technical support for Providence Physician business partners suffered from communication difficulties in organizing EMR, LIS interface and application connectivity documentation. Although support knowledge was collected, it had naturally dispersed to many network locations in the form of Outlook Contacts, Help Desk trouble tickets (Remedy), and multiple documents of different versions in different folders on file servers. In other words, answers were hard to find and update as a team. This caused an enormous amount of team stress, especially when the support call volume was high.








Creating page templates and a separate Wiki web page for each Physician Partner resulted in a baseline of 250+ separate Partner Pages that made it easy for the team to capture, upkeep, and improve Analyst level support details in a central location as free-form rich text, diagrams, videos and hyperlinks to related internal and external resources.

Concentrating support documentation that described network protocols, OfficeLink interfaces, and Admit One Security, Juniper, PACS, Portal, Citrix, iSite, Cerner and Physician Intranet applications in another 50 wiki pages resulted in faster issue resolution times by facilitating the team's ability to recall and update workarounds and other solutions to problems.




Linking the Help Desk team's Remedy software to the Partner Pages and using another team's SharePoint list as a lookup directory resulted in further synergies that improved the overall integrity, consistency, and quality of information collected.

The multiple collaboration enhancements and fast access to answers and information paid off in dividends, like stress relief, that were not easily measured. But the project did succeed in reducing incident resolution time from 20% to 60%, and it engaged the team in continuing to improve the speed and accuracy of Physician Partner support service on its own going forward.
Physician IT Support
Tigard, OR - 2009
Work as a contractor with Providence Health and Services (PHS) Regional Information Services primarily on teams serving Physician IT Outreach, Ancillary Informatics, Help Desk, Lab Systems and System Support Services projects.
SharePoint / SQL Database Integration

By automating the flow of data from a Change Management database to a SharePoint Events Calendar, the Enterprise Technology Operations team was able to remove the errors, omissions and time loss from their enterprise-wide system service change requests process.

The Enterprise Technology Operations Center (ETO) preferred to coordinate all system service change requests through a Change Management website and present them visually in an enterprise-wide SharePoint Events Calendar. This required extra time for hand-entering data in two places, and it frequently resulted in conflicts or omissions in information that compromised operations and left Help Desk unable to explain outages to callers - especially when an event was rescheduled.

Since combining calendar and change management functions into one database-driven application was not an option, a live link was required between the two databases that could automate and control the flow of data. The team's SharePoint rollout originally lacked BDC support, but research suggested other effective ways to link the WSS 3.0 List with an external SQL 2005 Server. The team settled on managing the link with MS Access 2007.





Building, testing and going live with an intermediary Access database took only two weeks. It met expectations, required the least amount of tuning, and accommodated the additional criteria of adding calendar events to SharePoint without affecting the SQL data. Given the little time and money available to the project, the result was elegant.

Using the team's SharePoint Wiki through-out the entire project to detail Proposal, Research, Build, Go-Live and Support stages in writing, links, and screen shots supported continuing service improvements after my role in the project ended.
"I gave Help Desk Analysts a clear view of physical network components at Partner sites though photos overlaid with connectivity diagrams."
The broader aim

This project aimed to strengthen the Partner Physician's experience of IT Support from Providence Health and Services.

By pulling together dispersed Marketing, Project, Build, Go-live and Support documentation into a unified and accountable body of knowledge, the project also aimed to empower individual team members to perform higher acts of service through insight into the activities and products of all other team members.
"By using a Wiki to document my research and solutions, the team was able to “follow the Rabbit hole” through my hyperlinked discovery process and findings to validate and choose the option that best fit their needs at the time."

"I pre-tested the sync process during Build phase and made a live video demonstrating how it worked to the Virtual team. It won Go-Live approval and catalyzed additional design criteria just as it normally does when the team is all in the same room or meeting."
"Detailing each phase of a project in the Wiki brought clarity to process, sped up approvals, and continued to serve the project's life as people come and go.”
"After studying interface, connectivity, and application info from distributed network and field sources ...
<a href="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">Flash Required</a>
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"By adding Javascript, I could embed videos from phone cameras or screen capture software like Snagit for more effective transfer of 'how-to" knowledge."
... I authored much of the text, diagrams, videos, and decision trees in the team's SharePoint Wiki, Lists, and Document Libraries"
“Max took a long standing problem for our team, and solved it with an elegant solution that met and surpassed our expectations.  We, and many others, use the Wiki and SharePoint site daily.  We have shared this design with other teams who have unanimously endorsed it as the best interactive documentation tool they have seen in our IT organization.“

Ruth Johanson
IT Program Director
Providence Health and Services
Regional Information Services
"I was so impressed with all that you have done in such a short amount of time. You make Kforce look good.  I appreciate all your hard work."
Michelle Matthews
Technology Recruiter
Kforce Technology Staffing
"As the team's Network Analyst, I noticed a region-wide SharePoint 2007 upgrade on the horizon and piloted a new team Site in advance of the general rollout to consolidate the team's project and support information. This helped the team collect, organize and more readily retrieve Physician support documentation ..."
"The Wiki can be used to process feedback from other teams more effectively than blogs or emails..."
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