OneConsultation v2 Resource Pack

You’re in the right place if you’re an existing OneConsultation Service Owner, administrator or support team. This resource pack will take you through how to upgrade to version 2 of OneConsultation.

Please note that content within this resource pack will be reviewed and updated regularly.  

Version 2 will move all consultations into your Microsoft Teams environment and provide the benefits of the rich in-meeting functionality that Microsoft Teams has to offer, while maintaining an easy to use waiting room service for patients.  

If you’re new to OneConsultation and want some more information on how it works and what it can be used for, check out our website.

OneConsultation architecture

Current architecture

In the current version of OneConsultation, patients enter their virtual consultation waiting room via a simple web browser, with no need to remember logins or download any apps. Once the patient clicks to join the waiting room, they are placed into a secure, cloud-hosted meeting space.

Using the OneConsultation admin portal, when clinicians see their patients arrive, they can join the patient via Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams or web browser, connecting in to the same secure, cloud-hosted meeting place.

You’ll see from the diagram below that both the clinician and patient are joining a meeting hosted in Modality’s OneConsultation video platform:  

OneConsultation v2 architecture - what's the difference?

In the new version of OneConsultation, the patient experience remains the same. Patients will enter the virtual consultation room by using a new-look web browser, with no need to remember logins or download any apps. Once the patient clicks to join the waiting room, they are placed into the lobby of a secure Microsoft Teams meeting.

Using the OneConsultation admin portal, when clinicians see their patients arrive, they will join the Microsoft Teams meeting and admit the waiting patient. Unlike a standard Microsoft Teams meeting, OneConsultation anonymises the clinician’s contact details in the same way as the current architecture, preventing contact details being shared. Once the consultation has ended, there is no way for the patient and clinician to reconnect into the same meeting.

You’ll see from the diagram below that both the clinician and patient are now joining a Microsoft Teams meeting hosted in the clinician’s organisation’s Microsoft Teams environment. This means that clinicians can take advantage of any Teams Meeting benefits that are already enabled in their organisation for standard Teams Meetings, such as blurred background, screen sharing and recording.  

Functionality Comparison

Here’s a summary of the video consultation functionality that is currently available within OneConsultation, and functionality that will be available with the v2 upgrade.

ü available today           ü coming soon

Consultations

Group Sessions

Admin Experience & Management

Security and Service Resiliency

Security

OneConsultation is hosted in Microsoft Azure and therefore adheres to Microsoft security practices for access to any part of the service.

Access to the Admin Portal to view waiting consultations is restricted by Azure Active Directory and only visible to users who authenticate using credentials from your tenant. Modality Systems do not have access to access this process or view any waiting consultations.

Modality Systems is ISO27001 accredited and conforms to the practices around access and account control in accessing the service. Modality does have access to the configuration and management of the underlying video bridging service for the purposes of managing and maintaining the service, but this contains no user information.

For more information about how security is managed within Microsoft Azure, visit the Azure Trust Centre.

For information about the different compliance offerings which Microsoft Azure can support worldwide, see the current list of compliance offerings.

Data security

The system does not store any user data at rest. Public user information gathered via the pre-consultation questions is only stored in memory for the purposes of displaying in the Admin Portal, and is never persisted to an at rest service.

Resiliency

OneConsultation is hosted entirely in Microsoft Azure and makes use of multiple Azure offerings to ensure a consistent user experience. Where relevant, Microsoft Azure support agreements are in place to ensure continued uptime and priority response in case of any incidents. System uptime is monitored continuously with Modality support staff notified of any issues. System status is reported on the OneConsultation Status Dashboard at https://status.oneconsultation.net

Prepare for your upgrade

Plan your upgrade journey

Overview

With any technology upgrade, planning is the key to a successful outcome. By taking some time to ensure that all of your key stakeholders are on board and your end-users are prepared, you should experience a successful transition to the new version of OneConsultation.  

Enlist your project stakeholders

We recommend enlisting help from the following roles and business areas before you begin the upgrade:  

• An IT/Microsoft Teams administrator will need to spend some time completing the technical setup steps required to prepare for the upgrade. https://docs.oneconsultation.net/acs-poc-onboarding
• The IT support team, or whoever in your organisation currently supports end-users with Microsoft Teams. As consultations will be moving from an outside cloud video platform to your own Microsoft Teams environment, this team may see an increase in the number of tickets/requests for help from clinicians. You can find more detail on how to prepare and support them in our Prepare your IT/Support teams section.
• Your Network team – they may want to make some preparations for an increase in the number of Teams meetings taking place.
• Current OneConsultation champions / services who already gain a lot of value from OneConsultation – you’ll need these for your pilot phase.
• Resources who can compile and distribute communication and training to your clinicians.
• Resources who can look at report data and gather clinician feedback. 

Define your upgrade scope

We recommend performing an audit of your existing live OneConsultation waiting rooms before upgrading. Modality can provide you with a full list of your current waiting rooms.

Things to consider:

• Perhaps there are some that are no longer required?
• Perhaps other services would like to get on board with OneConsultation because of the additional Teams meeting features that will become available to them in v2?

Please let us know via the support portal as normal if there are additional waiting rooms that you require or rooms that can be deleted.

Complete the technical pre requisites

There are some technical steps that need to be completed before Modality can begin upgrading waiting rooms. The steps are detailed here and should be completed by someone who has Admin rights to your organisation’s Microsoft Teams environment:  https://docs.oneconsultation.net/acs-poc-onboarding

Complete internal testing

Testing v2 internally (you’ll need willing volunteers to play the role of clinician and patient) will give the project team a good handle on how the new version works, which will be useful for reviewing existing workflows, updating training material and go-live comms.

Plan a user pilot

Once the IT setup steps are complete and internal testing has taken place, we strongly recommend piloting the new version with your current OneConsultation champions, or a service that frequently uses OneConsultation and is familiar and happy with the service.

By piloting with a small, friendly group first, you’ll be able to identify any potential issues before upgrading the rest of your waiting rooms, avoiding negative impact (on a wide range of clinicians).

If you’re unsure which of your clinicians or services would be good candidates, check out your OneConsultation Power BI report. You’ll be able to see from your ‘Usage’ page which waiting rooms are being used the most, and which clinicians take part in the most consultations over the past 120 days:   

If you don’t have access to this report, Modality can provide an extract for you.

Choose your upgrade journey

Once the initial IT setup steps are complete, it’s then down to Modality to upgrade your existing waiting rooms to the new version.  

Depending on how many waiting rooms you need to upgrade, there are some different approaches we can take to the upgrade:

• ‘Big bang’ – upgrade all of your existing waiting rooms at once
• Phased approach – upgrade your existing waiting rooms, a subset at a time, during a period of 1 month

It’s up to you to decide which approach would work best given the number of your waiting rooms and how ready your clinicians are for this change.

With a phased approach, we do recommend upgrading all rooms within a 1 month period to avoid lengthy crossover with the old and new architecture, which may cause confusion. 

Send out your comms

We know it can be difficult to reach a wide range of people to let them know that a change is coming, and to help them see the benefits – particularly where technology is concerned!

To help, we’ve put together an example communications plan with suggested content and timeline for you to use or tweak as you wish:

 with suggested content and timeline for you to use or tweak as you wish. 

Update your training material

Most of the OneConsultation functionality remains the same on the patient side, and most clinicians will be familiar enough with Microsoft Teams meetings to find the switch to version 2 easy. There are some things that will look and work a little differently, so it’s a good idea to refresh and update your training content for your clinicians.

Upgrade process summary

Here’s a short summary of the end-to-end upgrade process:

• Enlist help from your project stakeholders
• Complete the technical setup steps (for reference, these are here: https://docs.oneconsultation.net/acs-poc-onboarding)
• Audit your existing waiting rooms
• Prepare your internal teams
• Review your Teams meeting policies
• Internal testing
• Pilot the v2 upgrade with friendly services
• Decide how to migrate your services (all at once or in smaller chunks)
• Update training material and outline a training plan
• Schedule and send upgrade communications

Prepare your IT/Support teams

Overview

When your upgrade to v2 of OneConsultation is complete, all consultations will take place in your organisation’s Teams environment.

It’s important to get your IT Support / Help Desk teams updated and on board with these changes as early as possible, as they’ll have much more scope to troubleshoot and investigate issues, such as concerns over call quality.

We’ve included suggested communications specifically for your IT Support teams in our communications plan document.

You’ll also need help from the IT team to make sure your network and Teams policies are ready for the upgrade.

Network considerations

With more consultations taking place inside your organisation’s Microsoft Teams environment, the OneConsultation upgrade may be a good opportunity for your IT teams to review and optimise your network. Microsoft provide lots of guidance around this, we’ve picked out a few references to get you started:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/network-planner

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/microsoft-teams-online-call-flows

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/monitor-call-quality-qos

As a Microsoft Gold partner, Modality can also provide consultancy services directly to your IT department to help review and optimise your environment for the best possible Calls and Meetings experience. Please contact your account manager if you are interested in more information on this.

IP addresses

Previously we have asked you to whitelist a set of IP addresses for OneConsultation. When all of your waiting rooms have been upgraded to v2 of OneConsultation, you will no longer need to whitelist those IPs.

Instead, please see Microsoft’s guidance for IP ranges and Ports that will provide optimum Teams Call Quality and ‘Multimedia’ experiences.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/communication-services/concepts/voice-video-calling/network-requirements

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/prepare-network

It may be worth passing this information on to your IT/Network teams in advance of the upgrade.

Teams policies

Once the upgrade to OneConsultation is complete, your organisational policies within Microsoft Teams will dictate the functionality that is available to clinicians during consultations.

As a simple example, if recording Teams meetings is enabled across your organisation, all clinicians will be able to record their consultations once the upgrade has taken place. If recording Teams meetings is disabled across your organisation, your clinicians won’t be able to record their consultations even after the upgrade.

Ahead of your migration it’s a good idea to review which policies are currently enabled within your Teams environment and assess whether these are appropriate for clinician-patient consultations.

Here’s the Microsoft guidance around Teams meeting policies for your reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/meeting-policies-in-teams

Manage and monitor OneConsultation v2

Call quality dashboard

With v2 OneConsultation, all consultations will be taking place in your organisation’s Teams environment, which means you’ll have access to detailed call quality information about these consultations via Microsoft’s Call Quality Dashboard. The CQD is accessible via the Microsoft Teams admin centre. For more information on CQD, please see Microsoft’s guidance here:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/cqd-what-is-call-quality-dashboard

Status monitoring

We will continue to use our status portal to provide real-time status updates on the OneConsultation service: https://status.oneconsultation.net/

Anyone can subscribe to email updates to receive real-time notifications of any incidents.

Modality Power BI reports

Modality will continue to provide your organisation with Power BI reports to show usage and billing data. These will be deployed to you by Modality as part of the migration process.  

Summary and checklist

Prepare for your upgrade:

• Have you enlisted the following project stakeholders:
  • IT Team
  • Teams Administrator
  • Support Team / Helpdesk
  • Network Team
  • OneConsultation Champions
  • Resources who manage comms / training / feedback
• Have you completed an audit of your existing waiting rooms?
• Have the technical setup steps been completed?
• Has internal testing taken place?
• Has the Support Team / helpdesk been notified of the upcoming change?
• Have you reviewed your Teams Meeting policies within your organisation to make sure they are appropriate for patient-clinician meetings?
• Has your Network team been notified so that they can prepare for an increase in Teams meetings?
• Has a pilot phase with OneConsultation champions been planned?
• Have you decided how to migrate your existing waiting rooms? (ie phased approach or all at once?)
• Do you have a communications plan for your clinicians and Support Team / help desk?
• Have you reviewed and updated your training material?