With a workforce of around 10,000 people working on-site and remotely within the hospital system, and an information technology (IT) group of more than 450 team members taking care of their technology needs, Dr Chaudry oversees development of nearly 800 applications serving hospital staff, researchers, and patients and their families. Simultaneously Scott Bingham, senior director of IT core operations, looks after a 24/7 support desk serving clinical and non-clinical staff, as well as patients and families using MyChart, an app that enables communication with providers, access to lab results and telemedicine visits.

The appearance of telemedicine on the list of app capabilities is a sign of the changes that Seattle Children’s and its IT environment have undergone in recent years. Since the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic, the hospital system has moved significant parts of its workforce to remote and hybrid working arrangements. In IT and biomedical engineering, 80 percent of the 450-strong workforce now operates from home, Dr Chaudry reports. This shift, in conjunction with the ongoing imperative to “delight our customers”, as Mr Bingham puts it, is driving the organisation’s digital transformation efforts.

“Historically, printing is the Achilles heel” with a medical records system, says Mr Bingham. “It’s the area that causes pain.” But working with Kyocera, “it was a non-issue: the printing just worked with our Epic implementation.” Kyocera even invested time and engineering resources in writing custom drivers that could work with software that required older operating systems. This kind of solution would not be possible if the organisation sourced its equipment from a vendor that wasn’t selling its own technology, Dr Chaudry notes. In that case, “if it didn’t have the driver with it—good luck.”

The identity management features Kyocera offers have helped the hospital system keep sensitive personal data secure and confidential. When staff are making use of multifunction devices’ scan-to-email capability—a boon when trying to minimise the use of paper—it’s crucial that patient documents aren’t sent to the wrong person. The Kyocera system alleviates that risk. “The devices recognise who you are, then route the information correctly,” Dr Chaudry says. The same system means he can go to any of the hospital system’s sites, from Alaska to Montana, and scan or print a document there with the same credentials.

Working with the new devices also represented an immediate improvement in reliability. Previously, Dr Chaudry would see numerous printing issues escalated to his desk, where he and Mr Bingham would have to discuss what needed to be done. But despite the challenges of the pandemic, with the Kyocera fleet, he says, “I’ve not had a single escalation on printing—not a single one.” That, he jokes, has kept him from having to take blood pressure pills.

A key element of what it means to be a partner is helping customers work through the unique challenges they face when implementing new technology. For Seattle Children’s, the shift to Kyocera devices happened amid the covid-19 crisis, when of necessity many of its teams were working remotely. Mr Bingham describes how Kyocera overcame supply-chain constraints to deliver the needed equipment and worked on-site to do the implementation “in a safe, responsible way” across roughly 1,300 devices.

But the partnership is about more than just business. Kyocera, motivated by founder Kazuo Inamori’s injunction to “do the right thing as a human being,” has taken an interest in the mission of Seattle Children’s and in the families it serves, who may not have the capacity to pay for life-saving treatment, or whose difficulties with social determinants of health—such as food and housing security—place a further strain on their well-being.

Kyocera has not only donated funds to Seattle Children’s to assist its mission, but has also supported charity events such as a golf tournament organised by the hospital system and its Housing Solutions for Hope Guild, which focuses on addressing housing insecurity. “They’re not doing these things just because they have a business agreement with us,” says Dr Chaudry. The relationship the two organisations have forged comes from finding in each other a counterpart similarly driven by principles and a sense of purpose. “As they got to know us, the work we do and why we do it,” notes Dr Chaudry, “they came forward to say they wanted to help.”