Improving hospital communication & collaboration with Gmail & Google Workspace

About CHU St. Pierre

CHU St. Pierre is part of the University Hospital Center Brussels (UZCB), which groups together the public and university hospitals of Brussels. CHU St. Pierre is a public hospital where everyone can go for high-quality care. Based on this mission, they face the challenges of public health every day.  

CHU St. Pierre is committed to medical excellence. Its multidisciplinary approach makes the hospital a national and international reference. They work closely with various partners such as general practitioners, specialists, the CPAS/OCMW, and other aid and care institutions.

The Problem

CHU St. Pierre needed a modern communication and collaboration solution to facilitate (remote) collaboration and communication amongst its employees. Their Lotus Notes environment, which was used for both communication and collaboration, was outdated and also unstable. During COVID-19, the hospital needed to facilitate remote working for their staff, which accelerated the decision to move towards a new solution.

Next to their environment, CHU St. Pierre also wanted a better collaboration with the other hospitals in their network. The other hospitals are all on different systems like Exchange on premise and O365 and it was very hard to have visibility on all the agendas and the global directory of the other hospitals.

The Goal

The goal for CHU St. Pierre was to find an email solution that was easy to deploy and to adopt. Due to the limited IT resources they were looking for a solution that is easy to maintain.

To facilitate the collaboration with the other hospitals in the network, CHU St. Pierre was looking for some very specific communication tools too.

Another goal for CHU St. Pierre was to find a solution that is facilitating better, remote collaboration and communication.

The Solution

CHU St. Pierre could not continue with the Lotus Notus service, and was thus looking for a new, more professional email solution. After some discussions with partner Devoteam G Cloud, CHU St. Pierre chose to migrate to Google Workspace due to the breadth of tools it offers within one single platform. Google Workspace was the ideal solution for them because it’s very easy to deploy. There’s no maintenance needed because it just runs in a browser. It also facilitates the collaboration with other hospitals through calendar interop.

The goal at first was to migrate away from Lotus Notes and therefore start with Gmail, Calendar, Contacts, Meet and Chat.

This move made sense as most people are already familiar with Gmail and its interface. The staff can keep track of the emails sent with Gmail’s intuitive interface, which links all existing conversations in the same email thread.

Having identified Google Workspace as the best tool to facilitate communication & collaboration across the whole organisation, the next step was helping CHU St. Pierre’s employees through that transition. 

To make sure all its employees were on board with the change, CHU St. Pierre involved a panel of ambassadors in the process early on. Members of this group became early adopters in the first phase of the rollout. They received training to help them make the most of the tools. These internal champions served as resources for other employees. Devoteam G Cloud used a lot of change management techniques to create a positive buzz around this transition.

The Result

Google Workspace has streamlined the communication and workflow process for the staff of CHU St. Pierre.  Today, more than 2000 people use Google Chat, where the usage of chat was very limited before.

All the employees migrated to Google Workspace. They can now easily access their emails via office PCs, or remotely via tablets and mobile phones. With Gmail and Cloud Search, the email service is more reliable and finding an email is now quick and simple. “With Gmail, you can find what you need almost instantaneously,” says Bruno. “We no longer waste time searching for information or on classifying emails. Our staff is convinced of Google Workspace’s superiority and compatibility within our organisation.”

The Google Workspace migration resulted in a strong personal relationship with partner Devoteam G Cloud. 

With the success of the transition to Google Workspace, CHU St. Pierre realised it had another opportunity: move from the file server to the collaborative suite of Google & deploy Google’s integrated MDM solution.