• Migrated to Google Workspace within 2 months with no downtime

• Makes it easy for employees to adapt and be receptive of change with the Intuitive platform of Google Workspace

• Helps enable teleconsultation services for continuous patient care during COVID-19 with Google Meet

On a mission to provide quality healthcare services to people and communities, KPJ Healthcare offers a network of specialist hospitals, labs, and healthcare solutions in Malaysia and across the Asia-Pacific region. 38 years of experience in providing healthcare facilities places the organization at the forefront of the healthcare industry in the region today.

To remain up-to-date with the latest medical advancements and maintain operations across its 28 hospitals with labs setup in each of the hospitals, it is important to have a stable and reliable platform for communication so that teams can easily reach each other and be ready to respond to any situation. "We have a large network of internal and external stakeholders around the region, all with different needs and priorities. This is why it is important to have a reliable platform to ensure seamless communication and collaboration between them," says Yap Chee Wai, Chief Technology Officer at KPJ Healthcare.

When Yap joined KPJ Healthcare in February 2019, the organization was running three separate email and collaboration platforms. "Even before looking into the other parts of the business, I knew we had to consolidate all of these platforms to save time and streamline some of our processes," he explains. Maintaining three different platforms was not only costly, but also proved to be inefficient and time-consuming because they each had a unique setup and architecture to be managed and maintained.

After exploring the different options available, Google Workspace stood out due to its ease of use and affordability. "Our employees come from a wide range of age groups with different levels of experience and expertise when it comes to technology. So having a tool that is simple and intuitive was necessary so that everyone could adopt it easily. For that reason, choosing Google Workspace was a no-brainer," says Yap.

Today, KPJ Healthcare employees use Calendar and Gmail for scheduling events and email communication, Docs and Sheets for document collaboration such as working together on the same documents in real time, and frequently use Google Meet for meetings online. Many employees also use Forms and Sites to collect customer feedback and run surveys related to their services.

The migration to Google Workspace happened at a very unique time for KPJ Healthcare. When COVID-19 hit the nation in March 2020, employees were given an overnight notice to begin working from home. The pandemic meant that there was very little time to plan and execute. "When the Movement Control Order (MCO) in Malaysia kicked in, we only had a day to prepare," recalls Yap. "Luckily, we had finalised and signed the contract with the Google team and were already in the middle of the implementation stage for Google Workspace."

Without wasting any time, Yap's team immediately began working with the team from MatrixC, a Google Cloud partner, to expedite the migration and successfully rollout to 2000 critical employees' accounts (the rest of 7000 accounts are migrated in 3 stages). The entire rollout process was completed within 24 hours without downtime. "We were fortunate to be working with Google and MatrixC, which proved to be very knowledgeable and competent. With their help, we managed to accelerate the migration timeline and completed a month in advance," says Yap.

KPJ Healthcare’s IT team also put together the online training sessions via Meet for the company’s board members, management, and hospital staff following the migration. "Since we couldn't go back to the office, all the training had to be done online via Meet. Due to ease of use of Google Workspace inclusive of Meet, the users are able to start using the Google Workspace on their own after the training session," says Yap.

A key benefit of Meet is that it doesn't require users to install any additional files. So simple email instructions were sufficient for employees to navigate and get to the Meet session. All they had to do was open the email with the invite, click on a link to the meeting, and then click on the session to join.

This fuss-free access became a huge benefit for the thousands of employees who were new to the Google Workspace platform because it was much less intimidating than they had thought. As a result, they were more receptive to adapting to a new tool. "Drive is also very easy to use," Yap explains. "Navigating Drive is second nature to us because now we have all our files in one place and can find them easily. I believe Drive was probably the easiest of all the tools."

KPJ Healthcare has big plans ahead. With a digital vision in place, it is working towards turning its brick and mortar business into a hybrid one with digital as a new business arm. Future plans include a digital platform for customers that will integrate its web and mobile applications for remote diagnostics and monitoring.

"We started with teleconferencing, but we are now looking at how to run remote diagnostics and monitoring, where I believe Google Cloud can play a role," says Yap, adding that he is keen to explore new tools to support this mission when they become available.