Management

How ServiceNow Integrates and Optimizes Healthcare IT Delivery

The cloud-based service management platform is helping organizations overcome communication pain points and solve problems efficiently.

Adam Oldenburg

Adam Oldenburg is the director of CDW Healthcare Sales - West.

The healthcare landscape is growing increasingly digital and more complex. And while smart digital transformation efforts continue, many healthcare processes remain manual and require access to siloed data across an array of systems.

What’s worse: Legacy methods of communication such as email, fax and phone calls can slow down teams and make it more difficult to actually manage IT incidents. Outdated workflows, naturally, also affect patient care.

To reduce this complexity, we’re now seeing a major shift by roughly 60 percent of healthcare organizations to move specific, custom workloads to the cloud in order to improve access to information and connections across clinical teams.

Digital workflow platforms like ServiceNow — offering cross-organization workflows on a single, unified platform — can help healthcare organizations complete a variety of processes more efficiently. Here’s a look at some of the ways the Software as a Service platform can improve critical processes for IT, clinical staff and patients.

ServiceNow Delivers Value and Better Care to Clinical Staff

To efficiently integrate people, machines and departments, the first step must involve consolidation or replacement of legacy service management tools. Automating process and streamlining key workflows with ServiceNow can effectively break down silos across your organization and enable you to maximize your technology’s potential.

Take Broward Health, for example: The Florida medical center opted for ServiceNow ITSM as a means to support its digital transformation efforts, removing the barriers between its clinical and business departments.

By using the platform, Broward Health extended the full functionality of its IT services catalog in as little as three months. This offered clinical staff the ability to order from up to 500 service items — beyond the standard IT equipment or phones — and track the status of any item they ordered.

The result was a robust ordering system that can be tailored and automated to fit any of the team’s needs. A seamless interface connects the organization’s clinical staff and business units, significantly altering the way the organization manages its overall service delivery.

“The clinical staff can now devote their time to better customer service and projects, rather than working on ad hoc requests,” Tony Ruiz, the former IT director for Broward Health, told ServiceNow. We can now generate business intelligence for the volume and type of catalog requests. This gives us a reference point for further operational automation. It is a win-win proposition for us.”

All said and done, the ServiceNow ITSM platform provided the medical center with an IT solution that proactively identifies, addresses and fixes problems, rather than one that simply amplifies them.

Third-Party ITSM Providers Keep Security Front of Mind

IT service management in healthcare is often more difficult to navigate than other industries. A dual need exists to manage and protect patient health information — among some of the most heavily regulated data in the world — and a variety of technology deployments that include Internet of Medical Things devices.

That challenge was noted by CDW Healthcare’s Principal Field Services Architect Eros Canabrava during a Bring IT On webinar held last month:

“If we look at how HIPAA violations occur, particularly on the service desk, there's a trend that these violations are really occurring around human error or process failures."

INSIDER EXCLUSIVE: Become a HealthTech Insider to watch the entire Bring IT On webinar.

To help streamline the IT service delivery aspect while mitigating security risks, healthcare organizations should consider enlisting the services of third-party ITSM providers. These providers, in leveraging ServiceNow, can deploy and manage advanced solutions that help organizations keep sensitive resources like personal health information safe and accessible while enhancing overall security and productivity.

One example of such a solution: CDW’s Private Data Compliance app, SmartPDC. The app, built exclusively for ServiceNow, gives organizations more control over who sees what information by creating a step-by-step process allowing individuals to redact PHI that must remain private.

ServiceNow solutions such as these can help IT service delivery teams take the necessary steps in protecting their organizations while still enabling quality care.

This article is part of HealthTech’s MonITor blog series. Please join the discussion on Twitter by using #WellnessIT.