Unique user interface provides physicians with improved access to applications, an effective navigational structure, and a more personalized end user experience

1. customer
success story
Established in 1992, Emergency Medicine Physicians (EMP) is one of the leading providers
of emergency medical services in the United States. EMP began with one hospital partner
in 1992; currently there are approximately 1,000 physicians that staff 56 locations in 12 states.
Enhancing intranet effectiveness
EMP identified the need to redesign their intranet so they could provide their dispersed
physicians with improved access to applications and a more personalized end user
experience. “Simply put, we wanted to provide one-stop shopping for our physicians where
they can go to get their email, their statistical data, information for their business expense
accounts, and their paychecks, and collaborate with other physicians in the field. We have
remote sites across the country and it can be challenging for our physicians to communicate
with the other groups,” explains Jesse Eterovich, Manager of Application Development at
Emergency Medicine Physicians.
EMP realized that their existing portal solution did not offer the functionality they needed or
provide them with the integration capabilities that they required to be able to pull information
together from the various sources and advance productivity and efficiency.
Providing mobile delivery was also a key requirement for the physicians who are on the
road and need to be able to access the applications and content via their mobile device.
As a result, EMP placed a strong focus on validating the design for mobile devices when
the redesign project first began.
Open Text technologies help transform site
During the selection process, EMP considered several vendors before selecting Open Text
Portal (formerly Vignette Portal), and Open Text Collaboration, Vignette Edition (formerly
Vignette Collaboration). According to Eterovich, a major decision factor was ease of use.
“We have a very small IT department and minimal resources, but we have high demands.
For some of the other solutions that we looked at, we would have had to install a lot of
different components and we’d need to dive down to low-level code to accomplish things.
The Open Text Web-based platform provided us with an out-of-the-box solution that would
give us a Web site with functionality that we never had before, in a very short period of time.”
EMP purchased the Open Text platform in December 2008 and had it installed by January
2009. “By March of ‘09 we had a functional portal site integrated with Active Directory, so
we had security right off the bat, and some features like the statistical data available from
day one,” says Eterovich. “We feel certain that we could never have accomplished this with
some of the other vendors we looked at. I guarantee it.”
Industry
Healthcare
Customer
Business Challenges
n Dispersed workforce need easy access
to tools and applications
n Intranet required a more personalized
end user experience
n Physicians located at remote sites
across the country making it challenge
to communicate with each other
n Existing portal application did not offer
the required capabilities to integrate
various systems and sources
Business Solutions
n Open Text Collaboration, Vignette Edition
n Open Text Portal
n Open Text Portal Builder
n Open Text Business Integration Studio
Business Benefits
n Web-based platform offers out-of-
the-box solution for easy deployment;
simple, one-click access to data
n Improved access to information and
collaboration among dispersed teams
n Unique UI emulating the iPhone®
allows
for a fully customizable experience; users
can drag and drop portlets to build their
own personalized home page
n Intranet optimized for the iPhone and
the BlackBerry®
Storm so users can see
the same portlets on their mobile device
EMP Designs Intranet to
Emulate iPhone
®
Interface
using Open Text Technologies
Unique user interface provides physicians with improved access
to applications and a more personalized end user experience

2. User interface design fully customizable
Named mypulse, EMP’s intranet design delivers a unique user
interface (UI) emulating the iPhone,®
and allows for a fully custom-
izable experience, enabling users to drag and drop portlets to
build their own personalized home page. Additional features of
mypulse includes integration with social software and applications
such as wikis and blogs, a notification system that allows messages
to be sent to the intranet or a user’s phone, and an RSS feed
reader from which the administrator and users can select feeds
for display. mypulse has been optimized for the iPhone and the
BlackBerry®
Storm. This means users can see the same portlets
that they’ve chosen for their laptop, on their mobile device.
“The iPhone has had a lot of success with its ease of use. We felt
that same experience could evolve into a Web site and we were
able to accomplish it: simple, one-click access to data,” explains
Eterovich. “We’re also offering users the ability to display the data
the way they want by using the portlets. Giving the user more
control was also a large factor.”
Open Text Professional Services worked with EMP to develop the
unique UI that allows users to drag and drop portlets to customize
their homepages. “When they’re on the homepage, they can click
the customize page and see all the portlets that they currently
have. If they want to add more, they can find a scrollable list of
portlets that they can drag down into the customize page. Once
they close that page and go back to their homepage, the changes
take effect,” explains Eterovich.
The feedback for the new site has been extremely positive.“Basically,
the proof is in the pudding,” says Eterovich. “We recently did
some statistical analysis and found that out of a 1,000-person
user base, there are one to two physicians logging in every minute.
That’s a huge success for us. We don’t have the stats from two
years ago, but we can almost guarantee that we didn’t have more
than a dozen users logging in per day, and now it’s one to two
every minute. Just by that stat alone, it shows what our users
think of the site.”
Portlets offer personalized views
Open Text Builder streamlines portlet development efforts through
an intuitive, code-free development environment that relies on a
standards-based Web service to consume data from virtually any
application or repository, delivering the IT department at EMP a
single platform for application integration and deployment. The
physicians have several portlets to choose from for a personalized
user experience.
Action Items
One of the most popular portlets in mypulse is Action Items.
“Instead of getting emails from the different departments asking
them to complete an action, we wanted to create a portlet so the
physicians would have one place to go to access all the items,”
explains Eterovich. “For example, they can get action items from
our document management system letting them know that there’s
a new Coder Communications available; or from our Lotus Domino
application letting them know that there’s some continuing edu-
cation that they need to complete; or from our credentialing soft-
ware letting them know that they need to update one of their
licenses for a certain site. The challenge here was pooling all these
different systems together and then displaying them in Portal.
We used Open Text Business Integration Studio, Collaboration,
and Portal for this portlet. Business Integration Studio is our
connector between those external applications; Collaboration is
the container for all the action items and Portal is the presentation.
Portal interacts with Collaboration to display and notify the
physicians that they have an action item to complete.”
“We recently did some statistical analysis and
found that out of a 1,000-person user base,
there are one to two physicians logging in every
minute. That’s a huge success for us. We don’t
have the stats from two years ago, but we can
almost guarantee that we didn’t have more than
a dozen users logging in per day, and now it’s
one to two every minute. Just by that stat alone,
it shows what our users think of the site.”
– Jesse Eterovich, Emergency Medicine Physicians.

3. Notify Me
EMP customized the Notify Me portlet to interface with Collaboration.
This allows EMP administrators to configure notification messages
in Collaboration and trigger these notifications by dropping a file
into a particular Collaboration folder. Users subscribe to various
Collaboration folders through the Portal. “Once a document is
dropped inside a folder in Collaboration, a notification is sent out,”
says Eterovich.“For example: paychecks. We’ve created a process
using Business Integration Studio that not only imports the images
into a portal, but also sends a document to Collaboration that
contains all the users that have just received a new paycheck.
Then we created a business process inside Collaboration that
takes that file and compares it to who has subscribed to the
Paychecks folder. If there’s a link, we send a notification to that
physician, letting them know that they received a new paycheck.
The paychecks used to be mailed out to all our physicians. Now
they go onto the portal and can view a scanned-in image.”
Business Integration Studio facilitates integration of Open Text’s
content, collaboration, process, analysis and portal management
applications with disparate applications and content repositories
inside and outside the enterprise.
Another popular notification is for the EMP newsletters. “All of
our newsletters are saved as a PDF, so we’ve created a folder in
Collaboration called Newsletters and we’ve given some business
users at the corporate office access to the Collaboration folder
through WebDAV. They go in and upload the PDF to the
Collaboration folder and then anyone that has subscribed to
that Collaboration folder through the Notify Me portlet gets the
notification,” says Eterovich.
“The driving force behind the Notify Me portlet was to reduce
emails. We no longer need to send out emails telling them that
there’s a newsletter available or that they have a new action item
to do. This gives the users a lot more control and it helps us get
the information out in a friendlier manner.”
News
Physicians who want to subscribe to news updates from their
favorite Web sites can aggregate RSS feeds from many sites.
EMP customized the newsfeed portlet for improved usability, as
Eterovich explains, “The newsfeeds have a really nice UI where
the feeds automatically blend into one another. They can simply
scroll through all the different feeds, click on a link and the sites
open up in a lightbox, not a pop-up, but an iFrame window on
top of mypulse, giving it a more seamless feel. This keeps the user
within mypulse and allows them to view content from external
Web sites.”
Tangier scheduling software
EMP uses Tangier Emergency Physician Scheduling software
to provide the physicians with access to their latest schedules.
To simplify access, they created a portlet to integrate with the
third party Web site and used different Credential Vault techniques
to maintain credentials. “We were able to use the Open Text Web
Connector portlet along with a small amount of customization, to
store the credentials for this external Web site inside the Credential
Vault. When our users go to the Tangier portlet, we not only iFrame
that external Web site, but we pass the credentials for that user
from the Credential Vault to that Web site, basically giving it a
single sign-on field so they do not have to remember additional
credentials, just their credentials for mypulse. By leveraging the
Credential Vault, we’re able to allow them to seamlessly log in to
external Web sites,” says Eterovich. “We did the same thing with
email. We’ve stored the physicians’ email credentials for logging
into Lotus Notes inside the Credential Vault. And then we iFrame
our email system and we pass the credentials to Lotus Notes
from the Credential Vault. So when our users log into mypulse,
they don’t have to log into email. They can simply click the email
link and a lightbox will show our Lotus Notes email client.”
My Stats
The My Stats portlet was configured to provide physicians with
two pieces of information: the Patient Satisfaction Snapshot and
the Productivity Snapshot. “We survey a subset of our patients
and the data that we get back from the surveys is available for
each physician under the Patient Satisfaction Snapshot. Prior to
deploying the Open Text solution, all this data was entered in
Excel spreadsheets and mailed to the directors and then presented
at meetings. Now it’s being delivered through the Builder application
in a more personal fashion,” says Eterovich. “For the Productivity
Snapshot, we basically take what we’re billing for each of their
patient visits, compare it to the hours they work, and through
calculations determine productivity levels,” says Eterovich. Many
of the physicians really appreciate the My Stats portlet because
they didn’t previously have access to this data.
EMP’s intranet, optimized for the
mobile experience.

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customer
success story
My check
For paychecks, EMP developed a portlet called My Check. The
paychecks are exported into TIFF files from the Great Plains
software used by the accounting department. “We created a
process that is basically a combination of Business Integration
Studio and Builder. We leverage Business Integration Studio quite
a bit, not only for its file transmission capabilities, but also for its
Web service capabilities. A lot of our applications run off of Web
services that we’ve built through Business Integration Studio.
I can’t overstate how important it is.”
Eterovich adds, “In order to get our system up when we needed
to, we didn’t want to change any of the other applications that
we were using, because if we did that, we wouldn’t have been
able to launch the site as quickly as we did. We used Business
Integration Studio as the connector between those applications
and Portal. That really helped speed up the development and
implementation of Portal.”
User feedback key to success
Gathering user feedback was an important first step before EMP
built the portal site and added the collection of portlets. “It really
came down to what our users wanted. To get that information,
we created a suggestion box using a Builder app on Portal and
that’s where we got a lot of our feedback. We created a ‘win an
iPhone contest,’ so whoever submitted the best ideas won an
iPhone,” says Eterovich. “That suggestion box really helped drive
a lot of the ideas.”
Eterovich recommends that other companies take a similar approach.
“Right off the bat, you should be thinking of ways to engage your
users. That was very important to us. Also, the flexibility of shifting
as the feedback came in, which was critical, instead of heading
down a path that was predetermined. The suggestion box gave
us a lot of feedback and it also gave everybody insight into the
direction of the site.”
Benefits are easily identified
With their Open Text deployment, not only has EMP recognized
financial benefits, the system has also enabled the physicians
to work more efficiently and effectively. “We’re no longer mailing
paychecks, so this is a financial benefit for us. Additionally, our
physicians’ time is being used much more effectively. They no
longer need to dig for information. Also, now that we’ve moved
our Coder Communication process from a paper-based system
to an electronic system, we’re cutting down the response time
for our Coder Communications in half,” says Eterovich.
Employee training was minimal.“Even though many of the physicians
aren’t very computer literate, and can struggle with the simplest
of Web sites, we were able to introduce these new features without
any formal training. Given our user base, it was important that we
made this site as simple and intuitive as possible. This is not to
discredit our physicians. Their primary focus is patient care, not IT.”
Conclusion
“At the end of the day, our success comes down to the framework
that we’re running on. I don’t think we would have been able to
achieve what we did with any other portal framework, at least not
with the same man hours and dollars,”says Eterovich.“We’re happy
and we continue to look for ways to improve it. We do not want
to remain static in terms of the site’s appearance so we are
continually looking for ways to evolve and make it a much more
appealing experience for our users so that they keep coming
back, and hopefully, in turn, we’re making their lives easier.”
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