TeamHealth, a leading physician practice with over 23,000 employees, used to communicate with their employees mostly over email. They hadn’t quite figured out how to make mobile collaboration work—especially for clinicians—until they partnered with MangoApps.

With our platform, they’ve been able to sunset several costly tools and create a unified digital work hub where a single mobile app contains everything from training and policy information to SSO integrations with over 200 other applications.

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In this video, you will learn how TeamHealth used MangoApps to:

1. Connect physicians with nonclinical employees from across the nation
2. Engage employees by allowing them to effortlessly share resources and company news with each other
3. Customize their intranet to meet the unique challenges presented within the healthcare industry

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Full video transcript:

Dr. Kevin Klauer, Chief Medical Officer:

“TeamHealth is a large organization that many have referred to as a staffing company in the past, but we are so much more than that. We are a management services organization that really supports clinicians in the practice of medicine, nursing, and being a physician assistant and really come up with solutions for healthcare delivery.

The vision was really twofold. We know that the size of our organization is significant. And that’s one of our strengths, but quite honestly, it can be a weakness. Communication with almost 20,000 clinicians on multiple different topics is really a challenging thing. We sent out great programs, great thoughts, great ideas, but the penetration through normal email was limited at best. So we needed a way that not only was more up-to-date to communicate with them, but compelled them to participate in a community that we were creating. And that was the genesis of Zenith.”

Tom Perrine, Chief Information Officer:

“If you think about a field based organization, one of your largest challenges is you have all these people working all over the US and all kinds of different institutions, is communication and collaboration. How do you talk to each other, how do you communicate with each other? Once upon a time, email was an interesting way to communicate. But what we found in today’s social world is that people would much rather do small spiffy packages of information back and forth to each other that are really fast and convenient and more productive. And so what we needed was something that, first of all, was a mobile first application. Because who wants to carry around their computer all day long or wait until they get to some location to be able to communicate with another person? Everybody in the world today wants to communicate on their mobile device, whatever that is, and be able to do it in 30 seconds or less. And so what we really needed was a way to help all of our clinicians work in their care team environments and communicate with people outside of their care team environments while they were constantly in the field on the move and serving whatever patients they were serving.”

Dr. Miles Snowden, Chief Medical Officer:

“The 19,000 clinicians that are all out there working every day in somebody else’s building, not TeamHealth building, working on somebody else’s electronic record, for example, really didn’t have access to a corporate or an enterprise system of communication. They weren’t working on a PC that was provided by TeamHealth, they didn’t have access very easily to a TeamHealth email address. And so what we found is most of their mobile devices could accommodate two email addresses. Usually it was their personal email and the hospital’s email, which they needed every day for their work. That left TeamHealth out when it came to communications. So in essence, we were seeking to solve the problem that we couldn’t find a way to communicate to our clinicians in a mobile manner or even in a regular manner based on the limitations of mobile email at that time.”

Mike Gager, IT Vice President:

“The vision for a tool like Zenith was to build a mobile first intranet that allowed for communication and collaboration. Not only for administrative employees, but to reach out to our clinician base to help them engage and feel that sense of community and partnership with TeamHealth.”

Tom Perrine, Chief Information Officer:

“We looked at probably 20 different technologies. And what we found was that each of the individual technologies were interesting, but we were really looking for an integrated solution because what we wanted to do was create an experience for the clinicians where all of the things that they needed were essentially integrated into one simple icon on their mobile phone. And so while all of these different apps that we looked at all had interesting characteristics to them, none of them had an integrated suite of tools.

What we loved about MangoApps when we found it, and it was literally one of these accidents that one of our guys would just literally out just scouring the field looking for stuff and one day goes, “Hey, you guys ought to look at this. This is pretty cool.” And you had really all the stuff that we were looking for. So you had simple easy texting capability, you had HIPAA compliance, which for us is a really big deal because we’re communicating stuff that we can’t afford to have to get out. You had the ability to do something like an email. You had alerting, you had the ability for people to post things for other people to read if you wanted to. So our clinicians are able to … especially our administrators are able to do videos, post them out there, let their whole team read it, listen to it whenever they want to, see it, drop things into filing cabinets, send out alerts on things that are coming up, but just kind of this multimedia way that we could really communicate and collaborate all over with the field, both from the home office to the field and also the field within the field. And so that integrated suite of tools was really the most advanced thing we found in the marketplace. It really turned out to be a home run for us.”

Dr. Miles Snowden, Chief Medical Officer:

“The fact we had no one who had done this before, we saw enthusiasm with MangoApps and kind of a willingness to just go do it, to think creatively with us. And I think our early impression was that this was an organization that had the energy, and the creativity, and the wherewithal to take a journey with us that neither of us knew quite where it might end up. The last aspect of that I’d say is we liked the experience that MangoApps had with retail. There were aspects of an employee working at retail that felt similar oddly to physicians in that the retail employee is largely in a building far removed from any corporate governance or oversight and mostly moving about all the time. Most of our clinicians virtually never sit at their own desk space looking at their own hardware. So that felt a little bit familiar and gave us a little comfort that we were landing in the right place.”

Jonathan Hensley, Director of User Experience:

“It was quite a long process. We evaluated dozens of apps, scouring Google for a product that would meet all of our needs from chat to social internet, definitely a mobile first environment. MangoApps was the product that seemed to fit the bill for all those requirements.”

Dr. Kevin Klauer, Chief Medical Officer:

“Well, it’s all kinds of communication. At the site level, there is an opportunity to let people know that when they’re coming into work … I remember this was one of the very first things I saw. There had been, I think, an issue with a parking lot. You can’t park there. You have to park across the street. Your parking badge won’t work or whatever it was. Very simple solutions that people needed to know at their site, but global communication from the organization so they know where we stand in the opioid crisis or when there’s been some other natural disaster and important piece of information they may need to know, but also they need to know where TeamHealth stands on important issues that impact them. We can communicate at any level, which was really nearly impossible before.”

Jonathan Hensley, Director of User Experience:

“Lots of different groups use it in a lot of different ways. That’s one of the strengths. It’s very adaptable to what your team needs it for. All of our facilities that we have clinicians in have their own channels in Zenith who use the projects from MangoApps product. And those medical directors and clinicians at that facility can communicate in the newsfeed or share files about whatever’s going in the hospital. They do polls a lot on how things are going inside the department.”

Stephen Brile, Senior Engineer:

“We see chat being used quite heavily. The channels and the social feeds are used a lot. The file sharing is huge. We dumped our box.com over a million files from box.com into Zenith, and people are using that to share files just like they were with Box.”

Dr. Kevin Klauer, Chief Medical Officer:

“It’s changed in a variety of ways. And not only did we provide a communication platform, but we also made sure that we weren’t resolving only a communication issue for TeamHealth, but we provided clinical and education resources that were at their fingertips now that weren’t either available before we added resources or the former resources were made more easily available through Mango. We have the desktop, but also being mobily enabled made all the difference in the world. So not only can they communicate with us and each other, which is really important, which didn’t really exist before, but now we’ve provided clinical resources for them to use at the bedside that make healthcare delivery easier, better, safer, more effective.”

Dr. Miles Snowden, Chief Medical Officer:

“I would say there’s actually two aspects of that. One is we’re now able to create communications that you would ordinarily see on an enterprise intranet with a scrolling banner that you can click into, which almost every employee in corporate America today is accustomed to. We can now do that on the mobile application with our Zenith application. And we are finding that our physicians now out across the country are clicking in and are now seeing the enterprise news and information that formally only was consumed essentially by our non-clinical employees who were sitting at a desk in a TeamHealth facility.

The second way that it’s benefited us is the clinicians out in the hospitals and other facilities around the country now can be communicated to by me, or by their peers, or by other leaders in the organization through email or through other means. They are now accessing our TeamHealth email through, to our surprise, the Zenith application, and they are accessing our Zemail process in the Zenith app as well. So I can now communicate with the average physician out on the west coast working in a facility with nothing but his mobile phone to use every day.”

Dr. Kevin Klauer, Chief Medical Officer:

“Well, the response has been very, very positive. And really we had to make sure that when we created the buzz around this and let them know that there was going to be an opportunity for them to see something different, we had to make good on that promise. So the platform is solid, but then we had the obligation and responsibility to make sure we populated it with resources that were helpful. It can’t just be about communication. We all get a lot of communication every day. Many emails, phone calls, and everything else. Communication is a piece of it, but we also have to make sure that we create greater value and we’ve been able to do that with a lot of clinical resources we provided. So when they’ve seen the clinical resources and being able to communicate and exchange new ideas and we capture those ideas and act on them. Mango and Zenith have really created the opportunity to listen to the clinician and let them participate in the evolution of TeamHealth.”

Jonathan Hensley, Director of User Experience:

“The reaction was great. We actually launched at our national medical leadership conference where our top leaders get together once a year to get the corporate vision. And Zenith was launched on stage. We were fortunate enough to be in attendance and get to see the reaction. We had great reaction and enthusiasm over finally having a mobile product for communication and really bringing our clinicians together across the country.

We’ve heard some good stories. We had one recently from a colleague that went to the emergency room to see the doctor and it happened to be a TeamHealth physician. And she was mentioning that she’d worked on the Zenith project and that clinician said, ‘Zenith is a game changer.’”

Dr. Kevin Klauer, Chief Medical Officer:

“I honestly like to look at the newsfeed and then absolutely to see what the conversation and commentary is around them. And certainly anything else that comes up as you scroll through the app, you identify opportunities to see what other people are discussing. And I’m participating in many of those groups. So I can’t look at them all every day, but when we know we have an important issue at hand, it allows me to go right to those areas and see what’s important to our clinicians.”

Dr. Miles Snowden, Chief Medical Officer:

“I can’t second guess what a clinician’s doing in the course of seeing a patient and making treatment decisions. I have to be able to deliver to them information that inspires them to be a part of our organization, to be productive, and to feel fulfilled by being a part of our organization. If we can’t communicate enterprise concepts and activities to them, we can’t engage them.”

Jonathan Hensley, Director of User Experience:

“I think it really depends on the team. It’s just so adaptable. Everybody finds one or two core things that they benefit from. And I really think over time even that will expand to where more sections of users will use more of the product, but it tends to be that people find the one or two things that really speak to them and make their day easier.”

Stephen Brile, Senior Engineer:

“Really one of the places where MangoApps stood out as a partner with us is the ability to do a few customizations. 95% of what we needed was already there in the box. We didn’t have to make a whole lot of changes. One thing we wanted was a tighter integration with our single sign on product. So when we logged into the mobile app, we wanted that single sign-on session to flow through the mobile app similar to what it does in the web environment. And MangoApps was able to custom develop something to integrate with that, and it works really, really well.”

Dr. Kevin Klauer, Chief Medical Officer:

“I’m logging in from anywhere. It’s nice because I usually use it from the mobile-enabled app. Sometimes I do the desktop. I travel a fair amount, so I use it on my phone. And just like most of us do, the first thing I do when I get up in the morning, there’s certain notifications from certain apps. I want to know how many emails I got and I’m checking Zenith. Are there notifications there? And what do I need to know about? What conversations are happening that I can participate in or at least be aware of? And I love going in and seeing what’s going on in our community because it’s happening 24/7 and knowing that you have your finger on the pulse of the organization because you have created an opportunity for ongoing communication is really a game changer.”

Dr. Miles Snowden, Chief Medical Officer:

“Well, first thing I would say is, I don’t even think of it as logging in. I use a thumbprint and I’m in, so I’m in every day. I only use Zenith on my phone, my mobile phone. I can’t say I don’t ever go to the web browser version. I guess I do if I want to compose a long message, but generally I’m only on with my phone, I’m on every day. More often than not, I’m making certain that what I want to get deployed enterprise wide and communication such as the scrolling banner kind of communication that is out there. And a lot of my activity is once I’ve got a communication out to the enterprise is monitoring comments. So I like to be able to respond very quickly to any comment a physician will make about a particular item that we posted.”

Mike Gager, IT Vice President:

“For me, the most useful thing is just reaching out to my team, whether it’s on my mobile device, on my desktop, instant communication to be able to get quick updates, make sure we’re on the same page as we’re moving forward. We keep all of our files and communications around projects and pieces of work all centralized through that. It just allows for that central point of communication, collaboration that extends outside the walls of the corporate office to wherever we are, and that’s just been a tremendously helpful and successful piece for us.”

Stephen Brile, Senior Engineer:

“I am in Zenith every day. Even on the weekends, especially because of the mobile app … The mobile app is definitely my preferred way to consume Zenith. It’s just easy when you’re on the go and you’re at home and in the afternoons you need to check what’s going on. We’re in there every day for sure.”

Dr. Kevin Klauer, Chief Medical Officer:

“It is our primary communication platform at this point. Certainly we use standard email, but we really are moving away from it. And of course with the app, it provides the opportunity for the email equivalent in ZMail, which is our Zenith email. So we haven’t given up anything and we’ve gained a whole lot.”

Dr. Miles Snowden, Chief Medical Officer:

“Zenith already is the primary communication tool of TeamHealth. There is nothing that comes close to that. Our administrative employees that are sitting in our several offices around the country who are assigned a workspace and are sitting in front of hard hardware every day, of course, are still accessing the internet or enterprise browser as well as a browser-based Zenith application, but they represent less than 20% of our total workforce. So 80% or so of our total workforce. And from a compensation standpoint, more than 90% of our total workforce are only being communicated through Zenith today, and I’m quite comfortable with that.”

Tom Perrine, Chief Information Officer:

“We were originally going to get rid of TeamHealth email for clinicians, because they didn’t use it very much, but one of the things we did was embed it inside of Zenith. I mean one of the great features is you have the ability to embed all of your apps. So we embedded email. And one of the things that our founder had asked us and said, “Listen, at least make sure that they have the capability if they need to send external communication. That they can do it through our email system so it’s branded TeamHealth.” And I’m like, “Sure. We can embed it right in and it’ll be easy for them to use.” Well, email usage by the clinicians has gone up since we embedded email inside of MangoApps and we had not anticipated that. So in all forms of communication, not only just inside of Mango, it’s really improved our communication because so long as the tools are convenient to give them the type of communication at their fingertips when they need it, that’s what this is really all about.”

Dr. Miles Snowden, Chief Medical Officer:

“Adoption has been really, really good. So we are shooting for a 70% adoption over the first three years. That’s just a comparison with our older SharePoint sites that we thought we could get to. And we’re already at 65% adoption within a year among our clinicians and our leaders are doing even better. So they have an 85% adoption rate compared to the frontline clinicians today.”

Jonathan Hensley, Director of User Experience:

“MangoApps is really easy, honestly. I think one of its biggest strengths from an IT standpoint is its ability to adapt. There’s lots of settings that we can set to make Zenith work how we need it to work, and which allows other companies to do the same thing even though they need it to work differently. It really adapts to your needs very easily. I don’t know how to say how easy it is, but it’s too easy honestly from an administrative standpoint.”

Stephen Brile, Senior Engineer:

“With the single sign-on integration that MangoApps created for us, we are able to integrate all of our existing internal applications. So we have over 200 company applications integrated into what we call My Apps inside of Zenith, where it’s a single sign on that clicks, takes them into their scheduling, takes them into their payroll, takes them into their learning management system all integrated through the mobile app and the web experience. We’ve also worked with MangoApps to develop what we call the action center. This lets clinicians see exactly what they need to do on a day-to-day basis as far as their administrative activities to keep up with … There’s a lot of things that they need to do about keeping their license up to date and taking required training courses from time to time.”

Jonathan Hensley, Director of User Experience:

“Support with MangoApps as compared to other vendors is completely different, but in a good way. Our support results with MangoApps is extraordinary. They’re always there. And actually one of the cool things is that we get support from MangoApps inside the MangoApps platform. So as guest users on their instance of MangoApps, we’re able to submit any concerns, requests, customization items, bug reports, and responses virtually immediate. And we’re able to track all of those items through to completion in the newsfeed in MangoApps. It’s really a testament to the product.”

Stephen Brile, Senior Engineer:

“We use MangoApps’ own product to communicate with their support personnel. And 24 hours a day, no matter when we submit a problem or concern, we always get immediate feedback through the hub system. And every time MangoApps was able to come through and fix or solve the situation in a minimal amount of time.”

Tom Perrine, Chief Information Officer:

“Well, I think as you’ve heard me say before, you guys have far exceeded our expectations in every category. First of all, weren’t quite sure. It’s like, “Okay. Well, how flexible are they going to be with wanting to do X, Y, or Z? White labeling it, changing things around to meet our needs.” And you guys have been outstanding. Every single time we’ve asked for something you’ve told us, which we could and couldn’t do, how long it would take, how easy it would be, whatever the case may be. I would say we would rate you at the very top of our people who we have partnership with.”

Dr. Kevin Klauer, Chief Medical Officer:

“I wouldn’t say I’m happy. I’m elated about that decision. This is a great step forward for us. It’s differentiating for our organization. And MangoApps has been a great partner because we’re delivering what we want to for our organization and our clinicians. We have room for improvement, but now we have the fundamental pieces to make sure that happens.”

Dr. Miles Snowden, Chief Medical Officer:

“We’re very happy. I just reported out what in my term was our final report out to our board on this. And now I was able to report that after a basically one year period of time of deployment, we’re above 65% utilization on a rolling 30-day basis with variation month to month. But we are way ahead of our goal in that regard.More importantly, we’re finding that our leaders, both at the corporate level and at the regional and local levels are now relying on Zenith for essential communication on a daily or weekly basis. As we have made more and more of our corporate or enterprise applications available only through Zenith, we see jumps in adoption. So when we went, for example, to payroll only being available for our clinicians on Zenith, we had no concerns, no problems, no negative feedback, and a big jump in utilization.

The next change we made was to put scheduling only on Zenith. Scheduling is a very dynamic aspect of physicians in hospitals, very important to them and it’s accessed very frequently. And we often have to fill a schedule slot on the fly just a few hours in advance of someone not being able to make it. That became mandatory on Zenith more recently, and we saw another lift in adoption and once again, no negative feedback. So if you can get payroll and scheduling out on this mobile application and not have any negative feedback, that is a home run.”

Jonathan Hensley, Director of User Experience:

“I’m very happy that TeamHealth chose MangoApps. It was the IT recommendation after our long evaluation of products. I think everybody saw that it was the product that allowed us to do everything that we want to do in a single app.”

Tom Perrine, Chief Information Officer:

“For us, it’s been outstanding. In fact, I was with the executive committee last night talking about a number of things. And one of the things we talked about was some of our big successes last year in our projects and why were they successful? And Zenith MangoApps was one of the ones that we talked about. And it was so successful because we always measure success based on the satisfaction and adoption rate of the clinicians. Well, our adoption rate is way above what we thought it was going to be in the first year of usage. And if you think about adoption, especially in new technologies, you think about a third, a third, a third. So you’re going to have a third of the people who are going to be your kind of technology users, advanced leaders, whatever you want to call them. Another third are probably going to be your fast followers and another third are going to be kind of your laggards. They’re just not really technology people. They don’t like using technology if they don’t have to. And so we were expecting or hoping that we’d get that first third kind of in the first year and we’ve exceeded our expectations. And the people who are using it love it. The frequency of use is really high.”

Mike Gager, IT Vice President:

“I’d absolutely say I’m thrilled with our partnership with MangoApps. MangoApps has been a great partner in helping us think through how to take our experiences to the next level, how to provide our clinicians and our administrative staff the right experience through a mobile first platform. They’ve been open to our ideas of what is or isn’t working for us, and it’s been exciting to see what we’ve been able to create through that partnership.”

Stephen Brile, Senior Engineer:

“This is definitely the preferred product that IT wanted to get in here, and the leaders really took our recommendation. And that this really is the bright tool for what TeamHealth needs.”

Tom Perrine, Chief Information Officer:

“Oh, I’d say absolutely. To me, again, it really is when we, all the stuff that we’ve looked at and the things we’ve been able to replace, the economics is outstanding, the experience is terrific, the capability continues to grow every day. I would tell any CIO … In fact, I’ve started to talk to some of the Blackstone companies about just even looking at it for even smaller functions, simple things like replacing Box. Box is an incredibly expensive filing cabinet that’s encrypted, but it’s a single function tool that isn’t integrated with many things. It’s like, “Why not just replace it with MangoApps and get three or four other things that come along with it that are better capabilities?” So I would definitely recommend it to other CIOs.”

Dr. Miles Snowden, Chief Medical Officer:

“Every hospital, every physician group faces the same problem we did two or three years ago, and that is how do you attract more than your fair share of well qualified and well intended clinicians, and how do you retain those once you’ve attracted them? Because there are not enough clinical resources in our country today to provide the services necessary. We’re all competing for a limited and insufficient supply. And so the organization that is better at communicating, engaging, and inspiring those clinicians is the one that’s going to, at the end of the day, be more successful.”

Dr. Kevin Klauer, Chief Medical Officer:

“Well, if you ask me about return on investment, return on investment can be compartmentalized into a few different areas. Can we take a hard look at it and see if we have an economic return on investment? I’m sure that we can, but perhaps more important than that is the cultural return on investment. Having people engaged in your organization because they have a platform that creates a community and an opportunity to participate, cannot be quantified. There’s an absolute return on investment. And with Mango as our partner, we’ve been able to actualize our vision to make that happen.”

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