The national health service in the autonomous Spanish community of Castile and Leon – known as SaCyL – has migrated to Microsoft’s Office 365 productivity suite, improving and optimising the communication of the 35,000 professionals involved in the region’s vital public healthcare system.
SaCyL has more than 3,600 points of primary care across a large region marred by urban disintegration, and its digital transformation efforts, fuelled by Microsoft’s productivity tools, will greatly aid the service in its aim to provide healthcare to each and every single citizen that requires it.
The adoption of Office 365 and Microsoft’s Outlook email client in particular has improved communication between different departments and increased worker efficiency, resulting in an overall better service for patients.
In addition to improvements in efficiency, since the implementation of Microsoft’s tools, SaCyL’s costs have decreased, thanks to the migration to Microsoft’s Azure cloud service, which negates the cost traditionally associated with server maintenance, storage, operation and antivirus implementation.
Privacy and data protection are at the forefront of all businesses, and none more so than the healthcare industry, which deals with and stores patients’ confidential medical information. Rafael López Iglesias, Managing Director at SaCyL, explains that “from the security point of view, [Office 365] is the only solution in the market that covers our expectations with certifications such as the National Scheme of Security and of the AEPD. “Our sector is very sensitive in terms of security and privacy of patients’ data, and the Microsoft proposal was the best one in that sense”.
While digital transformation is a vital step moving forwards for all companies and services, it is also important to ensure that existing workflows and records remain accessible during the changeover period. Thanks to close communication and collaboration between Microsoft’s support teams and SaCyL’s technical engineers, Office 365 deployment took place in just three months, without any interruption to regular service or loss of data.
As López Iglesias explains, the introduction of Office 365 has become “…a reference for technological developments not only for Spain, but also abroad. This work is not by chance. It was in our roadmap. The reality is that we are ambitious in our expectations, so we must count on the collaboration of trustful travel companions, as Microsoft”.
