Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA), a Massachusetts-based health system serving more than 140,000 patients, was forced to rapidly change the way its employees worked in response to the COVID-19 crisis. Fortunately, it had already begun this transition in 2016, when it adopted Google Workspace for collaboration.

As the scope of the COVID-19 crisis expanded, CHA relied on Google Workspace to facilitate the many changes necessary to keep staff and patients as safe as possible. All staff who could do so shifted to working remotely, using Gmail, Google Chat, and Google Meet to stay connected. It was also necessary to reconfigure the hospitals and clinics to provide dedicated spaces for COVID-19 patients and reduce the risk of exposure for other patients. “We reconfigured our entire hospital system at the beginning of the pandemic, shutting down some services and moving some equipment. We used Google Forms and Sheets for tracking, fulfilling equipment orders, and other requests—all coordinated with our hospital command center,” says LaPlante.

Members of the Google Workspace team jumped in to provide CHA with a solution to accommodate extra frontline staff. It also helped onboard CHA’s Emergency Management Director on the use of a livestream using Meet, making it possible for CHA leadership to set up all-hands meetings about COVID-19. Livestreams are Google Workspace’s way of accommodating groups of up to 100,000 participants in a video meeting. Participants can access the meeting via a single click from a Meet-enabled conference room, their Google Calendar, or Gmail, whether they are in a CHA hospital, clinic, or working from home. “The team streamed teaching seminars through Meet, demonstrating the correct procedure for donning PPE,” explains LaPlante. “The teaching sessions were also recorded so that if some people couldn’t attend the original meeting, or if they joined the staff after the training was held, the training didn’t need to be repeated.”

For two years, Cambridge Health Alliance had been taking steps to prepare for the eventual deployment of telehealth capabilities. When the pandemic hit, the organization needed to rapidly accelerate that effort to continue to serve its community safely. Google Workspace partner Maven Wave, an Atos company, worked with CHA to accelerate the integration of CHA’s Epic electronic health record (EHR) system with Google Meet for Telehealth. This enabled healthcare providers to conduct HIPAA-compliant telehealth sessions that launch directly from the Epic EHR. Taking advantage of Google Meet for Telehealth was also cost-effective, because the functionality is included in all Google Workspace license offerings.

Maven Wave also added safeguards to the video conference itself. The system uses the Meet platform and gives both caregivers and providers full-featured Calendar integration. Plus, it ensures that the teleconference link is created instantaneously, making it virtually impossible for the connection to be compromised. Traditionally, with Meet created in a calendar invite, the patient’s name would be featured, potentially exposing personally identifiable information (PII), including email addresses. To mitigate this, Maven Wave built a shadow calendar as a connector on App Engine, where Meet for Telehealth sessions are housed, to declutter the provider’s calendar and obscure PII. Further, the solution automatically scales to meet demand without the hospital’s IT department needing to intervene.

The Google Meet for Telehealth solution helps ensure continuity of care for patients and saves valuable healthcare provider time. CHA patients now have the ability to seamlessly connect with their care teams, including authorized three-way conferences with family members or medical interpreters as needed, and they experience an authentic alternative to an onsite office visit.