Axceler ControlPoint Success Story
High Point Regional Health System
The Business Challenge
Since 1904, the High Point Regional Health System has been meeting the medical needs of the people in the High Point, North Carolina region. Over its century of service, High Point Regional has grown from a 12-bed hospital serving the 6,500 residents of High Point from a converted wooden-frame house, to a major medical complex providing care to a region encompassing 475,000. Another change that has occurred during this time has been the tremendous impact that information technology has made on the provision of health care.
To help manage their information, High Point Regional chose SharePoint as the internal information portal and application gateway for their 2,500 employees. High Point’s intranet home page is set to the SharePoint site, through which employees access directories, information areas for announcements, links to outside websites for clinical personnel, and links to internal applications. All employees have access at different levels.
Administering the overall SharePoint system, and managing access permissions for such a large number of employees, posed a formidable challenge to High Point Regional’s IT staff. “We realized that we weren’t going to get a whole bunch of FTE’s to monitor all our users comings and goings,” said Stephen Bodenhamer, Applications Systems Analyst. “So we knew that we were going to need a solution that would help us with SharePoint management. That led us to Axceler’s ControlPoint.”
The Axceler Solution
ControlPoint was selected because of its straightforward, easy to use interface, because of its capabilities in multiple-site management, and, as Bodenhamer said, “Because it would give us the ability to control user access and permissions without having to dig into SharePoint itself. This capability really stuck out for us.”
Taking Advantage of ControlPoint
High Point Regional has ambitious plans for the growth of SharePoint – and for using ControlPoint. “When we implemented SharePoint, we envisioned that all of our departments – both business-oriented departments, and our medical departments would have their own sites.” High Point Regional’s major departments include centers for heart, cancer, neuroscience, women’s health, joint replacement, and emergency care. To date, a handful of business departments have set up their sites. All clinical departments will also have sites of their own.
High Point Regional plans on setting up the department Sharepoint site administrators, known internally as architects, as ControlPoint super-users, allowing them to add users and permissions, and to update content. “We want to enable our department architects to have as much control over their own sites as possible. At the same time, we need to make sure that security standards are met, which is especially important in a hospital, given patient confidentiality issues and HIPAA regulations,” said Bodenhamer. “They don’t want the traffic cops in IT telling them what to do, and we don’t want to play the role of traffic cop if that means slowing things down at all. ControlPoint lets us give our users the power they need, while allowing IT the ultimate control that’s so essential for us.”
Results
To date, High Point Regional has been using ControlPoint primarily for usage statistics, such as how many hits were made on a specific URL, and for identifying dead and broken links. They have found that ControlPoint’s interface makes it very easy to run reports. One report that they’ve found especially useful is that on orphaned accounts. This proved especially important during a recent period during which High Point Regional experienced some turnover at the administrative level. The ability to identify orphaned accounts meant that key information would not be lost in the transition of an employee leaving and someone else assuming their tasks.
High Point’s SharePoint team plans on rolling the reporting capability out to the departmental architects as they set up their own sites.
“The departmental architects aren’t technologists; they’re experts in their business area or in their clinical field,” said Bodenhamer. “ControlPoint will give them the ability to quickly change their sites’ content, and determine who on their staffs should be able to view what information, without their having to become overnight techies.”
ControlPoint also enables SharePoint administrators to avoid duplication of effort, saving them time and improving productivity. “If people want a new site that gets pushed to the community and approved, ControlPoint will let the site’s owners determine whether they need to create a new group or use an existing group,” says Ryan McDaris, SharePoint programmer. “This can be a real time saver.”
“We realize that we haven’t yet tapped into all of what ControlPoint will help us accomplish, but even in our early stages with SharePoint, we recognized that it’s an excellent means to manage a large SharePoint farm with multiple site collections,” said Bodenhamer. “ControlPoint is just a great way to be able to get a handle on it.”