iStockphoto, one of the top online destinations for stock images announced the extension of its year-old program to provide low-res images and illustrations online, for free, to Microsoft Office users via Microsoft Office Online. Because the initial run of the program was so successful, iStockphoto will actually be increasing the number of photos they are making available. They are also planning to expand the program to new languages and countries in the upcoming year. The iStockphoto site benefits from links to higher quality photos that are available from the Microsoft web site which helps those users who need high-res images.

The clip art is available directly from http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/clipart/ or from within Microsoft Office software.

Sharing your calendar with a co-worker is as easy as sending an email. Click the calendar tab in Outlook 2007 and select “Share my calendar…” an email-like window comes up allowing you to share calendars with co-workers. But what about sharing your calendar with friends and family members who don’t use Exchange Server or might not even be using Outlook at all? The new calendar sharing feature of Office 2007 has lots of options for easily sharing your calendar with anyone.

Outlook-to-email: Chris E. Avis posted the first of his Office 2007 Coolness series, and in this tip he shows how easy it is to send your calendar via email to anyone on any platform using any email client.

Outlook-to-Web: There’s another option that I picked up from Jeff Sandquist, who shares his calendar with his family. Simply click the calendar bar on the left side of Outlook 2007, then choose “Publish my calendar…” and step through the wizard. This publishes your calendar to Office Online, where you can select the people you want to make your calendar available to, or you can publish it publicly to the world (you as the publisher, and the individual viewers will need to use a Windows Live ID to view private calendars.)

Outlook-to-other: Jon Udell has good blog post about how he shared his Outlook calendar with other calendar services like Google Calendars.

Outlook Sync'ing: Scott Hanselman has a podcast that digs a little deeper into how to sync Outlook with a number of different services and providers. Be sure to check out his resource links including the very impressive Holy Grail of Synchronization.

Back in January, I wrote a piece entitled Big Healthcare Savings from Surprisingly Simple Solutions. I profiled some excellent work at Childrens Memorial Hospital of Chicago where they are using solutions built with Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Office, and InfoPath to absolutely delight clinical staff and add of ton of money to their bottom line.

This story is especially compelling because it didn't take expensive consultants or a lot of IT support to make it happen. In fact, it originally started with one clinician who thought he could improve some scheduling and work-flow processes in his unit using software the hospital already owned. He did much of the work himself in his spare time. Some projects took only a few days to implement. Now, clinicians and business leaders across the organization are launching their own projects based on the simple premise of using very powerful, intuitive and proven commodity software to tackle some of the big issues in healthcare.

I wanted to share this story with more of you and decided to feature Children's Memorial Hospital of Chicago in my next House Calls audio-cast. And, who better to tell the story than the clinicians themselves. I hope you enjoy the show and I hope you'll share this with colleagues across the nation and the world.

Bill Crounse, MD   Worldwide Health Director  Microsoft Corporation

Click below to listen to the program:

Collaborative solutions for better patient care and a healthier bottom line
This program is also available in MP3 for download.

Are clinicians and business managers in your organization hindered by poor communication? Do gaps in daily work-flow processes overwhelm your hospital and reduce your bottom line? Despite the IT systems you have in place, do you still rely on paper forms and processes? Simple and cost-effective communication and collaboration solutions can reduce these problems for you, your care teams, managers, and patients. In this audiocast, Dr. Bill Crounse and his guests discuss how Children’s Memorial Hospital of Chicago is using information technology solutions from Microsoft to transform their business and improve their bottom line.

Panel guests

Dr. Cynthia Rigsby, is chief of Body Imaging at Children’s Memorial Hospital and co-chair of the Department of Medical Imaging. She also serves as professor of Radiology at Northwestern University.

Dr. Andrew De Freitas, is attending physician in the Cardiology division at Children’s Memorial Hospital, is also a professor of Cardiology at Northwestern University.

Eric Gasber, is a Registered Nurse in Surgical Services with the Nursing Sedation Team at Children’s Memorial Hospital.

Even if you work in a so-called “most wired” American healthcare facility, I guarantee if you look around you’ll still find lots of paper forms and processes. Paper is endemic in American hospitals and clinics, even in those with fairly robust enterprise information systems and electronic medical records. Paper is still used for staff scheduling, HR processes, reporting, transfers, discharges, and all kinds of other tasks.

There are a couple of ways around this. You can ask your HIS vendor to automate a work-flow that’s still trapped on paper. But often the aggravation, delays, and high costs don’t justify the return; and that's if you can even get them to do small projects like this. You can also buy specialized software to solve these problems, but you just end up with a bunch more departmental applications in an already crowded and complex array of applications that don’t talk to one another.

That’s why I have been so pleased to learn what some of our most innovative customers are achieving with software that so many of them already own. This is particularly true of the way some hospitals and clinics are using Microsoft Office and SharePoint Server (MOSS) and InfoPath Forms.

One such example comes from Children’s Memorial Hospital of Chicago. Last week at our Healthcare Executive Forum event in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Eric Gasber, RN, followed me on the podium with a presentation that truly wowed attendees. Eric describes Children’s use of SharePoint as a solution that “begins where the enterprise applications end”. In example after example he showed paper based workflow, reporting, and collaborative processes that had been automated with MOSS. Most of these solutions were developed by Eric with little help from IT. He’s created solutions for time off requests, patient financial services, crash cart logs, meeting agendas and materials, service requests, and pre-procedural forms and scheduling for interventional radiology, cardiac catheterization, and anesthesia. Some of these solutions took just hours to put into production. Some took days or weeks. Eric soon identified “power users” in the organization who could develop their own solutions and forms.  “If they have ever created a form in Word, they have most of the skills they need”, he says. 

In some cases the return on investment from these solutions is measured simply by delighted clinical or business staff. But in many cases, Eric can claim real dollars coming from his work. His solution for Cardiac MR scheduling resulted in an 80 percent increase in scanned cases per month. Total increased throughput in Cardiology and MRIs have resulted in an additional $6.5 million to the bottom line. Eric attributes this success to the fact that the solutions he designs using SharePoint Server and InfoPath are fast to develop and implement, highly flexible, and very intuitive for end users.

This is another great example of how commodity software is being used to address critical business and clinical processes in hospitals and clinics, at a cost that is affordable. And that means more money for what really counts in healthcare; taking care of our patients.

Bill Crounse, MD         Healthcare Industry Director        Microsoft