Our legacy intranet sites – Wellnet for L-Wellmont and Pulse for L-Mountain States Health Alliance – will stop displaying on the Ballad Health intranet page and be decommissioned on Tuesday, April 25. Team members who use those sites are instructed to access all their internal SharePoint sites via the Ballad Health intranet main page. All legacy intranet pages from those legacy sites have already been transitioned over to the new Ballad Health intranet and are available there. URGENT: Please check in advance to make sure any sites you use are already re-established on the Ballad Health intranet. If you find that a page/site has not yet been transitioned from one of the legacy intranets to the Ballad Health intranet, contact the IT Service Desk at 423-431-6290 or email the desk at helpdesk@balladhealth.org. How to find sites on the Ballad Health intranet Our IT team has created a page that displays, in Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet format,…

Our legacy intranet sites – Wellnet for L-Wellmont and Pulse for L-Mountain States Health Alliance – will stop displaying on the Ballad Health intranet page and be decommissioned on April 25. Team members who use those sites are instructed to access all their internal SharePoint sites via the Ballad Health intranet main page. Many of the crucial intranet pages from those legacy sites have already been transitioned over to the new Ballad Health intranet and are available there. We continue to evaluate legacy pages and migrate them to the Ballad Health intranet. More details are forthcoming. URGENT: Please check in advance to see if any sites you use are already re-established on the Ballad Health intranet. For old pages that are not already established on the Ballad Health intranet – once any of these pages are transitioned to the Ballad Health intranet, and the old Pulse and Wellnet sites are removed, team members will need…

Recently, a top official in the U.S. Executive Branch announced their Twitter account had been hacked. “Hacking” a Twitter account usually means the person’s email address and password were obtained in some other breach and the bad guys tried that combination on Twitter. Account compromises occur daily in a world where every website requires some form of account username and password. Generally, websites (especially social media sites) require an email address as the username. If any of these websites are compromised or if you fail to recognize a phishing attack, then it is likely your email username and password have also been compromised.  If you have used the same email address and password on other sites, then your compromised credentials could be used to access other websites with the same credentials, potentially exposing any information concerning you within those sites. Five steps Here are some steps to help users understand how to protect your online…

Ballad Health team members at some facilities will soon see a minor change to time clocks, as we are replacing 86 of the current time clocks around the system with the most recent Intouch model. See the schedule below for when affected facilities will make the transition. From a user perspective, these new models are essentially the same as the current 4500 version, but they feature a touch screen instead of buttons. Each affected facility will only have one time clock down at a time while they are being replaced, and the downtime for each clock is estimated to be 20 minutes. Why are we doing this? The company that maintains firmware for our time clocks has discontinued updates for the 4500 models. We are phasing out the old models for security and maintenance purposes. Facility schedule Below is a chart with the scheduled facilities and the expected installation dates. These dates may change, and…

Who and what is affected If you access Ballad Health email on your personal phone, you may have some Legacy Wellmont/Mountain States Health Alliance/Ballad Health email contacts that were automatically synchronized with your device, giving the appearance that they were part of your personal contacts. These synchronized contacts may be impacted by Ballad Health’s systemwide change on Monday, March 20, regarding how work email is accessed from personal devices. (See here for more details on this change.) Whether or not you take the steps required to continue accessing email on your device, there is a possibility you will notice contacts missing from your devices in the coming weeks and months. This is because, upon removing your previous work email application, these synchronized contacts will be lost from your device. Synchronized contacts may also be lost upon resetting your phone or replacing your phone, even if you copy over all apps and contacts to a new…

In order to keep using your Ballad Health email and other work accounts from non-Ballad Health mobile devices, you will need to set up Intune and multi-factor authentication (MFA) on your devices. This applies to team members who access work email, Microsoft Teams or Microsoft Office from personal phones or tablets, and those who access VDI remotely from a personal device. This is optional, and you will not be required to download anything to your personal devices, but team members who opt out will lose access to work accounts on personal devices on March 20. There’s more information below, and the key place to find all the tip sheets, FAQs and training session schedules you need for this change is the ShareIT site of the Ballad Health intranet. Important note to leaders: Please share the flyer below with your teams so we can make sure all team members who currently use personal devices to access work…

An Epic upgrade is scheduled for Wednesday, March 15, beginning in the early hours of the morning. Here’s an FAQ to help you prepare. Who is affected? These changes apply to all Ballad Health Epic users. What is expected? On Wednesday, March 15, beginning at 12:01 a.m., Epic users will experience a scheduled Epic downtime due to Ballad Health applying the Nov. 22 version of Epic. IT analysts will place a freeze on non-emergency changes in Epic beginning Wednesday, March 8, at noon through Thursday, March 16. In preparation for the upgrade, the IT Clinical Informatics team will offer virtual training sessions and provide tip sheets prior to the upgrade, as applicable. The IT Clinical Informatics team will also perform facility rounding to ensure team members affected by the upgrade are prepared for the upgrade and associated downtime. The Clinical Informatics team members will continue their rounding late Tuesday, March 14, and resume normal rounding…

If you access work email, Microsoft Teams or Microsoft Office from your personal phone or tablet, you will notice some changes to how you access these apps. Additionally, if you access VDI remotely from a personal device, you will soon notice some changes, as well. There’s more information below, and the key place to find all the tip sheets, FAQs and training session schedules you need for this change is the ShareIT site of the Ballad Health intranet. If you need any additional help, please reach out to the IT Service Desk at 423-431-6290.

If you access work email, Microsoft Teams or Microsoft Office from your personal phone or tablet, you will soon experience some changes to how you access these apps. Additionally, if you access VDI remotely from a personal device, you will soon notice some changes, as well. Why are we making changes? Cyberattacks on hospitals and health systems can be devastating to both team members and patients. As the nature of cyberattacks is always evolving and health systems are among the most common targets, it is vital that our cybersecurity measures are as good as they can be. To this end, we are constantly evaluating our own cybersecurity practices and seeking to improve them before weaknesses can develop. There is always a heightened security risk when team members access work accounts from their personal devices, but we understand that many of our team members use their devices for a variety of work-related purposes. So that our…

As part of a SharePoint upgrade, effective Tuesday, Jan. 31, team members will see a very minor change when they use the mileage, expense and CME reimbursement links. The process for submitting these forms will not change, and the location for accessing them will remain the same on the Ballad Health intranet. The only difference will be for team members who have those links bookmarked as favorites/shortcuts on their computer; those bookmarks will no longer work once the upgrade takes place. Anyone who prefers to access the links that way will need to update their favorites or bookmarks with the new URL. Pending reimbursement submissions will be available to approve on the new site. Any pending submissions older than six months will be deleted. How do I find these reimbursement links? As a reminder, to find the links for these types of reimbursement requests: Go to the Ballad Health intranet main page and click on…

As we defend our health system against cyberattacks and other scamming methods, here’s something new to be aware of – especially for our providers. It’s a type of cyberattack using “Clop” ransomware that specifically targets healthcare providers in a new way. The ransomware group has reportedly been infecting files that look like medical documents and subsequently requesting medical appointments in hopes of getting victims to open the malicious files. Key info Here are some key facts about how this type of ransomware works: Clop typically targets organizations with an annual revenue of $5 million or higher. These have included dentist and doctor offices and other smaller providers that operate as part of bigger healthcare systems. The ransomware group has been infecting files that are disguised to look like medical documents, submitting them to facilities and requesting a medical appointment in hopes of the documents being opened and reviewed. Practitioners may not think about cybersecurity when…

Effective Friday, Jan. 13, Virtual Desktop Interface (VDI) users will no longer be able to access email through the Outlook app. Instead, team members in VDI will use the “Ballad Email” icon that is located in the Start menu. Please note, this change will only affect team members working in a VDI environment; these are mostly clinical and remote users. Any team members not using VDI will continue to access their email as before. While the Outlook app will no longer function in VDI starting Jan. 13, the app icon will still be visible to anyone who has pinned it to their taskbar. It is advised that users unpin this “dead” icon from the taskbar using the following steps: Right click on the Outlook icon in the taskbar Select “Unpin from Taskbar” Users can then pin the Ballad Email icon to their taskbar if they want to keep their email readily accessible. See our list of…