The challenge

OSF HealthCare is a not-for-profit Catholic health care organization that operates a medical group, hospital system, and other health care facilities in Illinois and Michigan. Headquartered in Peoria, Illinois, OSF HealthCare is owned and operated by the Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis.

In 2016 OSF began building an app to facilitate onboard training for new nurses. They looked for a partner to manage the devices used in onboarding, that’s when our partnership began. At the beginning of our partnership – we introduced the use of iPads with our M3 Platform and had them programmed with unique logins to allow nurses to advance through training. At this point the iPads were utilized primarily for progress reporting. Nurses always begin their shift with access too a clean, charged, ready-to-use device at their fingertips with the latest stage of their training.

In 2017, overall digitalization and the use of tablets in hospitals started becoming more prevalent. OSF looked for different ways to increase productivity and client satisfaction by becoming ‘more digital’ in their processes with the use of tablets. Like many hospitals, one of their targets was to increase HCAPS score through customer satisfaction by increasing patient experience scores. That’s when OSF saw an opportunity to utilize the devices for patient use.  OSF took advantage of the M3 Platform by providing additional services to their patients. They are continuously adding applications and various services in their pursuit to maximize patient satisfaction. The M3 Platform enables this continued adaptation. After OSF integrated with Epic, the tablets were programmed with My Chart & My Chart Bedside applications using a server component: these applications enabled patients to obtain real-time access to lab results, treatment plans and medications from their bedside. Eventually, tablet use for OSF hospitals shifted to patient focused completely: for survey use, bedside support, medical records, and entertainment. Epic being the largest Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system for hospitals gave the proof of concept for OSF to upscale deployment of the M3 Platform across more locations. This enormous change in patient experience and increase of tablet use made our M3 Platform an integral part of the ecosystem, ensuring nurses were not burdened with IT tasks related to upkeeping their patient devices. Before partnering with M3 Solutions, the nurses were required to perform device wipes before returning it for the next nurse to use which of course took time away from nurse activities and client care.