Moffitt Cancer Center looks to the future of hybrid patient care and collaboration with Zoom

“For cancer care, compassion is everything,” says Cristina Perez. As the director of patient experience at Moffitt Cancer Center, Cristina knows firsthand how hard it can be for patients to navigate life with a cancer diagnosis. 

“They come to us at the worst time in their lives and need support — not just for medical care, but in all aspects,” she said.

The Tampa, Florida-based cancer treatment and research center operates with a mission to contribute to the prevention and cure of cancer. In addition to its renowned medical and research teams, Moffitt’s technology and IT teams also play a significant role in helping further the center’s dedication to fighting cancer through education, research, and compassionate patient care. 

As the center’s focus on telehealth began to evolve, so did the need for a scalable platform that could support its virtual healthcare offerings. Moffitt needed a seamless solution to enable its doctors, nurses, specialists, labs, and patient care advocates to better collaborate. This led the IT team to evaluate its communication stack and proactively seek out a single, unified platform to bridge together end-user devices, mobile technology, and conference rooms to create a more unified experience.

Consolidation creates a unified platform experience

Bridging the communication gap between locations was a top priority, so Moffitt chose Zoom to replace its disparate point solutions.

The cancer center deployed Zoom Meetings, Zoom Team Chat, and Zoom Webinars to 6,000 employees in 2019 and began working to replace the legacy hardware in its conference rooms with Zoom-enabled hardware. Today, Moffitt has more than 170 Zoom Rooms across seven facilities.

Powering a hybrid workforce

Moffitt’s hybrid workforce consists of employees working from home and in the office, which can make it difficult to communicate without reliable technology. Having previously enabled Zoom Rooms across many of its facilities, Moffitt employees can collaborate with relative ease and use the flexible workspaces to bring dozens of surgeons, providers, and other members of the care team together in person and remotely to discuss patient cases. Rooms are outfitted with large touch screens that enable providers to clearly see imaging so they can review and diagnose tumors with the similar ease of someone in the same room. 

“There are better camera angles on the audience, speakers and anybody who’s participating, so there’s better engagement rather than just one static camera staring at people,” Manny said. 

In addition to the enhanced conference spaces, Moffitt employees have improved asynchronous communication across their distributed workforce via Zoom Team Chat. Team members enjoy less frequent emails along with the ability to create chat channels for a specific team’s needs, segment chats by topics, and store and search conversations with ease.

The cancer center plans to leverage Team Chat more often by capitalizing on the integrations it provides and exploring even more collaborative features. Where they haven’t traditionally had great communication opportunities in the past, Moffitt Cancer Center hopes to make Team Chat the norm for deploying organizational announcements, training, and collaborating on a greater scale.

Delivering quality care from anywhere 

Prior to 2020, Moffitt had a small practice of virtual care, comprising 50-60 sessions per month. With the growing preference and necessity of telehealth in 2020, Moffitt’s virtual visits increased by 5,000%. And by the end of 2021, the company’s providers were hosting between 3,000 and 4,000 virtual visits per month. Today, telehealth is a critical pillar in Moffitt’s 10-year strategic plan and is key to delivering quality care to patients who may be too sick to travel or receive treatment. With the help of the Zoom Workplace platform, patients can communicate with medical staff from the comfort of home.

As it continues to grow its footprint in Florida, with additional clinical facilities on the horizon, Moffitt’s teams are considering technology’s role in patient engagement, using Zoom to help further their ability to offer the highest level of care.

“Telehealth is composing approximately 10%-15% of our outpatient care,” Cristina said. “Using Zoom as an enabler for our telehealth solutions has become an important part of how we offer care.” 

Learn how Zoom helps healthcare organizations like Moffitt communicate and work together seamlessly across Zoom Workplace, our AI-powered collaboration platform that enables hybrid workforces to reimagine teamwork and stay connected.