Transforming Healthcare with Digital Workflows: ServiceNow
A unified workflow platform like ServiceNow can improve employee, clinical staff, and patient experiences by reducing the friction associated with healthcare’s complex and fragmented network.
Healthcare enterprises are transforming to become digital-first enterprises to meet clinicians and patients demands where they are —online. With all the digital transformation initiatives started by the companies that are underway, many processes are manual and require access to information stored in siloed systems across the organization. Communication along the way consists of emails, spreadsheets, forms, messaging, telephone calls, and even rarely interoffice envelopes. To reduce this process of ups and downs, healthcare organizations are moving towards cloud, which enables them an improved access to information and better collaboration with employees and customers. According to the CloudView Survey, 60% of healthcare providers are moving custom workflows and business process management to cloud networks. Platforms are an addition to help IT improve service levels, and are supporting healthcare organizations to streamline HR, customer service, and overall digital transformation by improving access to critical information to complete a wide variety of processes efficiently.
Digital transformation and benefits
The healthcare ecosystem is extremely complex. The Multidisciplinary teams of healthcare providers work with patients across the paradigm of health and care. Digital transformation is often fragmented because patient health information is stored in siloed systems or the parts of a particular process are still paper-based. Healthcare IT can provide coverage to the entire organization, and IT, HR, patient, and clinical processes all benefit from digitized workflows. When deployed with efficiency, service management and workflow solutions can provide the following benefits:
1. Making a great first impression with prospective and new patients
Patients across the globe are spending about 20% of their overall wealth on healthcare, thus they are evaluating on where and what to spend depending upon quality care and cost-effective price. Positive first impression can be made when the customer service representatives can answer the questions, help them navigate and book appointments for them easily. Patient Satisfaction plays a vital role in influencing customer retention, increasing reimbursement and creating brand loyalty. The growing focus on customer experience and customer engagement encourages patients to participate in health and wellness programs which demonstrate the value of healthcare organizations.
2. Making a great first impression with employees and clinical staff
HR organizations are resource constrained as healthcare organizations are focused to reduce administrative costs. However, there are peak volumes of hiring recently graduated nurses and doctors who are looking for training and employee opportunities. The onboarding process of HR extends from HR, IT, facilities, legal, compliance, and finance. The multiple point of contact between these newly hired clinicians is frustrating for medical staff, hiring managers, and new employees alike. A platform based solution streamlines the onboarding process by facilitating smooth transition between departments as they have inter-department information. In a shorter span of time, the new employees become productive members of the organization which leads to better financial outcomes and improved employee satisfaction.
3. Optimized workflows for faster and high-quality work
Most healthcare organizations are challenged by legacy IT systems and resource constraints. However, digital transformation requires investments in terms of people and finances in modern agile infrastructure. Consequently, healthcare organizations are also moving towards cloud based infrastructure to manage workload. A unified platform solution can enable healthcare IT organizations service levels. These improved service levels will not only help in identification and fixing issues but also, improves IT end-user satisfaction to work faster.
4. Reduce the cost of IT
The ability to track licenses for tech as-a-service basis is essential in the multi-cloud environment. By reducing the number of unused licenses — for both on-premise and cloud-based solutions — leads to lower cost of IT ownership.
5. Using RPA to automate repetitive tasks
A platform approach with integrated automation tools (like automationedge) enables healthcare organizations to automate repetitive tasks to build their own custom-defined and flexible workflows across the enterprise.
6. Best practices for healthcare organization
The unified platform architecture enables healthcare organizations to develop their own workflows and applications to make available in the platform’s marketplace for free or for a fee.
Reduced process friction achieve value-based healthcare system
Across the globe, the healthcare organizations are focused on achieving the following objectives:
1. Reduced Costs
Eliminating waste and improving employee efficiency and productivity through workflow automation of repetitive tasks
2. Improve Quality
Poor communication, handovers between caregivers and staff, and lack of access to information create adverse medical events.
3. Improved Experiences
Complex healthcare processes lead to lower levels of patient and customer satisfaction. This includes the combination of physical and digital workflows.
ServiceNow in Healthcare
ServiceNow incepted in 2004 with a belief of making simple work done without complex and multi-level steps. From the beginning, ServiceNow has a mission of creating powerful digital workflows to get work done. ServiceNow workflows are designed to automate, predict, digitize, and optimize business processes and tasks — such as IT, customer service, security operations, HR— to create better experiences for employees, users, and customers while transforming the enterprise. At the core of ServiceNow is the ability to digitize unstructured workflows.
Electronic health record (EHR) help button
ServiceNow is integrated with several major EHR systems. At one click of a button, clinicians can report an EHR issue without having to log out of the EHR and log-in to another system. Information about the issue is sent to ServiceNow to automatically open and categorize a service ticket that is routed to the clinical informatics team. Customers using this feature have seen a reduction in the number of unreported issues and help desk calls.
Medical device management and security
Connected medical devices, especially those with older embedded operating systems with known security vulnerabilities and uneven patching practices, put healthcare organizations at risk. ServiceNow’s configuration management database (CMDB) and discovery tools are designed to make it easier for healthcare organizations to inventory medical devices and track their patching history as well as identify and locate which devices need to be patched
HR workflows
Efficient onboarding of clinicians is critical in a competitive job market
Customer service
Healthcare organizations are thinking about their patients as customers or consumers who have a choice of where they seek care. The quality of the care and the patient experience will influence whether the patient will be loyal to the institution or seek care elsewhere. The ability to combine information from multiple systems of record to be accessible from a service portal creates a system of engagement.
Until healthcare organizations start to think differently about how to improve their processes, they will not be able to meet the rising expectations of patients and staff who are now accustomed to using a mobile application to “get things done” easily in their personal lives. A service management platform that is integrated with clinical, financial, and operational systems is essential for achieving the goals of value-based healthcare.