How Zoom Better Enables Patient Care, Employee Development at Moffitt Cancer Center

“Moffitt’s mission is to contribute to the prevention and cure of cancer,” said John McFarland, Moffitt Cancer Center’s senior director of technology and business management. And while the Tampa, Florida-based organization is renowned for its medical and research teams, its technology and IT teams also play a significant role in Moffitt’s mission.

With the way technology and care have evolved, it’s critical for doctors, nurses, specialists, labs, and so many others involved in a patient’s care to effectively communicate and collaborate. That led Moffitt to evaluate its communication stack, McFarland explained, and proactively seek out a mobile-enabled, video-first culture across the organization.

“Multiple people were using multiple different solutions to try and do the exact same thing,” he said. “So we went on a journey to find a single, unified platform to bridge together our end-user devices, mobile technology, and our conference rooms to create a single, unified experience for our community.”

Consolidation of communication solutions

Replacing multiple, disparate point solutions with a single platform to bridge the communication gap between locations was a top priority, and Moffitt eliminated quite a few of those point solutions — and helped to enable HIPAA compliance — using Zoom.

“For us, HIPAA compliance is an incredibly important piece of any communication platform,” McFarland said.

Moffitt deployed Zoom to 6,000 people across Moffitt in just two weeks and leverages most of the Zoom platform — Zoom Meetings & Chat, Zoom Webinars, and Zoom Rooms. McFarland said his teams are in the process of deploying Zoom Rooms across the entire organization.

“We’re replacing all the legacy hardware in our conference rooms with Zoom-enabled hardware,” he said, “and we now have just one platform to support.”

“Deploying Zoom has been very easy to do,” said Frankie Del Rosario, Moffitt’s supervisor of unified communications, and that extends to Zoom Rooms. “If it’s one of our smaller or medium-sized conference rooms, we can do it ourselves. It literally takes 30 minutes.”

In addition to the seamless user experience Zoom provides, Moffitt’s Unified Communications Manager Doug Blankenship says he loves how Zoom can better connect pathology and surgery teams.

“They will be able to collaborate with each other in real time while the patient is in an operation,” he said. “It decreases the time the patient is under anesthesia and provides a better means of communication with our pathologists and operating teams.”

Zoom’s role in employee development

Zoom has also had a positive impact on other Moffitt departments. Stacey Johnson is an organizational development specialist at Moffitt, and much of her job is focused on employee education, training, and career growth.

“We provide the entire organization with services like professional development, career development, new-hire orientations, and engagement surveys,” she said. “We have different campuses in different locations, so the team uses Zoom a lot to collaborate with others and create virtual workshops to grow and develop team members.”

Johnson told us a few ways Moffitt’s Organizational Development team uses Zoom:

• Educational workshops: “We now have the Infection Prevention Team Zoom in for New Hire Orientation instead of having them present in person. They don’t have to travel, they can control slides for the presentation, and they can participate from another campus. The virtual presenters also get a view of the audience, and they can actually see who’s asking questions.”
• “Jeopardy!”-style training: “Supervisors come together in a Zoom webinar session, learn about resources, and participate in an interactive ‘Jeopardy!’-style review. They can virtually raise their hands and use the chat to ask and answer questions.”
• Internal troubleshooting: “We used a new platform for our employee engagement survey, and we could troubleshoot user issues using Zoom. Department leaders could share their screens through Zoom and we can help them get logged in and navigate the new platform, help them share the data, etc.”

Johnson added: “With Zoom, there are just so many different ways to engage our team members without having to have a classroom setting. Even people who aren’t all that tech-savvy aren’t afraid to use Zoom because it’s so easy to use.” 

 A few of the specific Zoom features Johnson loves:

• The ability to IM yourself and make notes right in the Zoom Team Chat
• The search function for finding previous chat conversations more quickly
• Whiteboarding, for collaborating when everyone can’t be in the same room and the ability to email the whiteboard notes after the meeting

High user satisfaction, extended hospital support

When Moffitt conducted an internal survey on the Zoom platform, Blankenship said, it garnered an extremely high satisfaction rating.

Johnson described the important role Zoom will play in Organizational Development’s future, including its digital transformation goals for Moffitt’s “Impact 2028” strategic plan. 

“Inclusion is one of our core values,” she said, “and we’re trying to include as many people as we can with some of the program offerings we have. Historically, we’ve been a pretty classroom-driven organization, but Zoom adds that level of digital advancement that we didn’t have before. Zoom allows us to blow out the walls and support the hospital and all its team members better.”