October 29, 2021 – By Lisa Carroll, Public Sector Lead, Microsoft Canada
The pandemic has challenged healthcare providers to learn, adapt and reimagine patient care delivery. For CBI Health, one of Canada’s largest community healthcare providers, COVID-19 upended both its in-person treatment and in-home care services. Within two weeks of Canada’s stay-at-home order in March 2020, the organization adopted Microsoft Teams with support from Long View Systems, a member of the Microsoft Partner Network, to deliver critical virtual care and telehealth services for remote patient assessment and treatment.
Microsoft Teams provided CBI Health clinicians the opportunity to not only stay in touch with and support clients, but to continue to provide active treatment and progression toward their health goals. CBI Health also used Teams to coordinate with local governments and other organizations as they worked to handle the influx of in-home clients resulting from the pandemic.
With this shift to a new cloud-based care system, CBI Health made security a top priority. According to Cameron Chojnacki, Director of IT Operations at CBI Health, the journey to an improved security posture required the organization to manage alerts and respond to security events with a level of sophistication they didn’t have. For Chojnacki, Microsoft Azure Sentinel offered the flexibility and scalability needed to ensure operational continuity and reinforce business resiliency, while maintaining robust data security. With direct integration to Teams, Azure Sentinel enabled CBI Health to collaborate seamlessly across the organization.
Chojnacki says the speed and ease at which the team was able to configure Microsoft 365 and Azure Sentinel to meet their evolving needs is one of the main reasons CBI Health was able to begin hosting virtual care sessions within two weeks. By providing a birds-eye view across an organization, Azure Sentinel delivers comprehensive intelligent security analytics and threat intelligence. It provides a single solution for alert detection, threat visibility, proactive hunting, and threat response.
In addition to Azure Sentinel and Teams, CBI Health has built custom apps with Microsoft Power Apps, adopted Surface Laptop devices to improve its standard of virtual care and increased both its cloud workloads and automation in order to lessen the amount of manual data entry for its employees.
As Canadian healthcare providers continue to implement digital solutions that provide better patient experiences, insights and care, data security and privacy must be paramount. However, cybersecurity should never get in the way of innovation. Healthcare providers can now implement both innovative practices and a highly secure infrastructure to maintain an edge in the future. For more information on the Future of Healthcare Security and Compliance, download this e-book.