The findings of the test deployment proved convincing. “FSLogix gives us true cached Exchange mode through its Office 365 Container,” Riegler explains. “Our Outlook launch times went from several minutes to seconds. We also saw a dramatic improvement in the ongoing performance issues when navigating within Outlook such as opening a new email and composing an email, replying to an email, and switching to the calendar.”

FSLogix removed the roadblock that Cherry Health had reached with its Office 365 migration. “We had reached a point where we were looking at what would need to be done to regress to hosting our Exchange environment in house again,” Brower says. “The performance was abysmal, and it would have impacted care givers and their ability to see patients.” As nearly all 1,000 staff at Cherry Health launch their Outlook at the start of each day, the productivity repercussions were huge—over 11,400 hours annually or $687,000 (assuming a $60/hour salary).

“Time is a critical commodity for us,” Brower adds. “The performance degradation would have prevented our approximately 300 providers from seeing at least one patient daily.” This adds up to potentially over 70,000 patient visits. The upgrade to Office 365 also extends SharePoint collaboration to all of Cherry Health’s staff and providers, something Riegler believes will improve productivity and the quality of patient care. Disaster recovery (DR) and availability are areas of benefit as well.

The ability to use shared mailboxes with Office 365 Riegler anticipates is another area that will benefit Cherry Health. “While we don’t have a huge number of shared mailbox instances, we have some use cases where these will improve staff and provider productivity,” Riegler says.