Montse Bestué Fumanal: Improvising connections for a hospital

When crisis hits, people's work and home lives mingle more than ever. Sometimes, this yields unexpected solutions. That's what happened in the home of Montserrat Bestué Fumanal, a Cloud & Cognitive Partner Ecosystem Marketing Manager for the region including Spain, Portugal, Greece and Israel.

Montse, as she is known, has worked at IBM in Barcelona for 30 years, in different roles and departments. Her husband works in the public procurement department of a large hospital in the Catalonia region—an especially critical function during the pandemic. His 11-person team is charged with sourcing and managing the purchase of supplies and services for various hospital departments. This includes supplies for coronavirus patients and protective gear for doctors, nurses and staff, as they face an unprecedented crush of cases.

Through the years, this team has conducted its business at the hospital, with daily meetings and only the occasional need for someone to connect remotely. This changed abruptly with the national shutdown decreed in mid-March. Members of the department were told to work from home, but only the manager had a hospital laptop equipped for remote work; other team members had to work on their own laptops or PCs. The hospital IT department provided a software communications platform, and team members could speak on the phone. "But the eleven team members couldn't hold meetings all together," Montse says.

Montse told her husband about the Cisco-IBM initiative to offer schools and hospitals free of charge Cisco Webex licenses for online meetings, plus help with installation and ongoing support. The couple worked together to obtain a license and get the team meeting online. Not everything was seamless: One person who had an old computer had trouble connecting the microphone, so ended up supplementing the video with a telephone connection. Another ended up accessing the meeting on a smartphone. Despite these small complications, the team was back together and carrying out their work efficiently

"The department's work is more important now than ever," Montse says. "With Webex, they're once again able to have effective meetings that lead to idea generation and increased productivity."

→ Visit the IBM News Room's complete coverage of IBM's response to the coronavirus pandemic