Modern solutions that can be customized according to the needs of each organization can promise business continuity during the pandemic.

Recruiting and retaining IT talent is a daunting challenge in the healthcare sector, which often loses its talented employees to other highly competitive industries. While employing a competent workforce is vital for the efficient and effective running of healthcare companies, it is equally important to sustain their competitive advantage in an industry that is witnessing rapid changes amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Erik Decker, Chief Information Security and Privacy Officer at the University of Chicago Medicine, spoke about the significance of technology in healthcare during an interview with HealthTech [1] stating, “The reliance on technology in healthcare is so profound. It’s not possible for us to operate for any sustained period of time on paper.”

Amidst the surging demand for skilled workers and a record unemployment rate in the industry (reaching a 20-year low in May 2019 [2], the healthcare sector is being forced to adapt in order to grow sustainably and to maintain quality IT services.

Read More: Five Reasons Why You Should Embrace Telemedicine At Your Practice

The ultimate solution: modern IT Service Management (ITSM) tools. This strategic approach can facilitate streamlining workflows while filling the gaps in IT in healthcare, and in saving time as well as money.

What Is IT Service Management?

The domain of IT Service Management entails the activities performed by a company to design, deliver, implement and control its IT services for the end consumer.  ITSM is generically a proactive approach to IT with a heavy focus on the end user’s needs as compared to those of IT systems. It emphasizes continuous improvement.

In the absence of strong ITSM, an organization’s productivity and efficiency can both diminish. This is where modern, healthcare software-based tools such as ServiceNow can prove useful. Such solutions can facilitate a company in maintaining primary IT functions, for instance, the Service Desk, while simultaneously adopting a broader view to its IT processes.

In addressing these challenges, it’s crucial to acknowledge the role of specialized companies for medical software.

Mike Roberts, Marketing Manager for CDW, wrote in a recent blog [3], “You must consider the various dependencies and links across ITSM and IT processes, even if there is no pressing need to do so.” He proposed, “Such big-picture thinking will be invaluable for future enhancements or should an unforeseen problem arise.”

Traditional Uses of ITSM in Healthcare

Quality ITSM in healthcare can particularly help organizations in streamlining existing processes and mitigating risk by regaining control over their IT costs while simultaneously improving patient care. Novant Health is a classic example worth mentioning.

Read More> Staying Patient Centric With EHR

An N.C.-based healthcare system, the Winston-Salem, runs its IT management platform on top of ServiceNow, integrated with its Healthcare Compliance Program to ensure regulatory adherence and operational efficiency. Deploying this software as its service-delivery platform, the company aimed to reduce the amount of human error involved with IT and to break down silos that were hampering the delivery of quality customer service for its clinicians and staff.

Novant’s primary objective: Upgrade the potential service level of the health system through the Help Desk wherever possible, and accelerate decision-making.

“We try to be as proactive as we possibly can in how we service our infrastructure within our facilities,” contends James Kluttz, Vice President and CTO for Novant, “whether it be a physician practice, a corporate facility, or an acute care facility.”

Novant has significantly enhanced its model in the past year. The organization was previously accustomed to a telephonic approach, where the staffers used to call in, speak to an agent and report their incidents. Now, they are able to spend more time with patients because of chat capabilities that eliminate hold times for end-users and also allow the workers to perform their jobs more efficiently.

“We try to be as proactive as we possibly can in how we service our infrastructure within our facilities, whether it be a physician practice, a corporate facility, or an acute care facility.”

James Kluttz Vice President and CTO, Novant Health

Novant also recently deployed ServiceNow’s machine learning solution. Predictive analysis is auto-run by the system as soon as incidents are recorded, identifying where each issue must be routed to. IT workers also triage the incidents so as to offer the end-users a set of three options for resolving the issue on their own.

Kluttz identified, “We’ve tried to make it much more self-service using the Predictive Intelligence technology because it looks back at historical trends within ServiceNow and allows us to do a predictive resolution to a lot of those types of issues.”

How ITSM Tools Are Helping During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Kluttz also identified that his company was well-equipped to face the massive shift to remote working even prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Novant already had scalable solutions in place that could easily function if the nonessential staff were not in the office premises.

Kluttz added, “When we think about our remote workforce, we already had the architectural capabilities to surge to a much higher level of remote work.” He added, ““It’s very difficult to scale people, but I can scale a tool — and that’s what we’ve always tried to work toward.” The VP further stressed, “Our mantra is, ‘Let’s put the software solutions and technology solutions in place that, regardless of what might come our way, we can easily scale up to meet the demand.’

It goes without saying that the organization’s hindsight, its ethos, and the practice of creating educational documents all helped it set up for early success.

Kluttz proposed that the effort produced fewer service tickets than anticipated primarily because of the documentation that was designed for end-users who were not in the habit of working from home.

“We did have a little bit of an uptick in service tickets,” says Kluttz, “but it was more educational calls than it was anything else. So, while we did have an uptick, it was not like a doubling of incidents that came into our service desk.”

On a broader note, leveraging modern ITSM solutions is essentially preparing Novant Health and other such healthcare organizations facing whatever might come their way. By streamlining operations, ITSM solutions aid in delivering a smoother experience for end-users, while constantly driving organizational efficiencies.

References:

1. https://healthtechmagazine.net/article/2020/01/qa-uchicago-medicines-erik-decker-how-attract-healthcare-it-talent
2. https://www.wsj.com/articles/it-unemployment-rate-estimated-at-20-year-low-11560206011
3. https://aptris.com/news-events/itsm-insights/itsm/how-would-batman-avoid-itsm-issues/