As health IT leaders and providers embrace agility and consumer-oriented philosophies at an accelerated rate, they are also being tasked with improving clinician efficiency and wellness in addition to patient outcomes and experiences.
To do that at scale, IT teams must be able to meet healthcare organizations’ needs quickly, be agile in how they operate, and develop and implement new solutions to support a modern care delivery experience.
About 60 percent of health technology executives surveyed by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions described their organizations as being midway through their digital transformation journeys, with 28 percent reporting that they were far from their ideal digital state. In addition, 40 percent of respondents reported that their healthcare organization doesn’t have a well-defined digital transformation strategy.
However, as many healthcare organizations approach digital transformation, they are taking a consumer-centric approach. Ninety-two percent of respondents reported achieving a better patient experience as the top desired outcome from digital transformation.
To spur digital transformation, healthcare organizations are increasingly turning to tools from ServiceNow, not just for functions such as IT service management (ITSM) but also for a service-oriented IT model that enables an IT team to advance a healthcare organization’s digital strategy and mission. ServiceNow’s platform can serve as a modern operational backbone for healthcare organizations seeking to transform how they delivery care and engage with patients.
DIVE DEEPER: Learn how ServiceNow can help transform your healthcare organization’s operations.
ServiceNow Tools Enable Digital Transformation in Healthcare
Dale Landowski, an ITSM product manager for ServiceNow solutions at CDW, notes that organizations need standard processes, shared data, shared applications and shared technologies to thrive in this environment. Healthcare organizations must avoid having multiple applications that perform the same function, he notes.
Sharing data is essential to transformation, Landowski argues, and ServiceNow enables that for agencies via a shared data repository.
“That provides the insight and the ability to modernize and create a true modern backbone,” he says.
As patients’ experiences with healthcare organizations have grown more digital and personal during the pandemic, their expectations for how they should engage with their providers has changed. IT teams need to become strategic partners to healthcare organizations as they seek to meet patients’ expectations while improving clinical and operational efficiencies.
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To focus on that kind of work, healthcare organizations can leverage ServiceNow to simplify and optimize IT operations by merging core operational functions into a single platform. The platform enables not just the standardization of processes but also the ability to share data in support of shared applications.
This empowers health IT teams to work in a service-oriented fashion, operating not as a cost center but as an integral element in the delivery of modern, mobile-friendly services that clinicians and patients can access at any time. ServiceNow tools allow health IT teams to function more like a business than a technology provider, able to forecast demand and focus on the delivery of core services.
“If you’re not thinking about services and products, and you’re not talking about services and products, and you’re not able to articulate what services and products you’re supporting in IT, you’re not going to be able to have conversations about digital transformation, because that’s where the transformation is taking place,” Landowski says.
How Healthcare Organizations Rely On ServiceNow
A wide range of healthcare organizations have turned to ServiceNow to improve clinician efficiency and patient engagement.
For example, Miami-based hospice provider VITAS Healthcare has expanded its ServiceNow footprint over time, after turning to the platform several years ago for one purpose: to manage the mobile devices it provides to its staff in 14 states. The move saved $70,000 on one month’s phone costs alone. It was so successful that VITAS began using ServiceNow to enable staff to onboard new patients using Apple iPhones.
In 2020, Phoenix-based HonorHealth turned to ServiceNow to deploy a simple chatbot that could handle the flood of pandemic-related queries that threatened to overwhelm nurse call lines. Visitors to the healthcare organization’s website could use a COVID-19 symptom checker or chat live with a nurse.
Most organizations have shared network and infrastructure capabilities but lack services with clear value, Landowski says. Often, IT teams deploy those shared capabilities but are not engaged with the business or mission areas of the organizations.
“Good organizations, and organizations that have a modern operational environment, have services that provide value back to the business,” he says. “They understand what it is and what they’re getting, and they pay based on what they consume.”
UP NEXT: Learn how ServiceNow supports digital transformations in healthcare.
