Improving workflows for better patient care
Reid Health stands out as a rural health centre that promotes technology innovation to enable more personalised, cost-effective patient care. By using proven, leading technologies, the organisation can better serve the community and improve services even as cost pressures are felt across the healthcare industry.
It was Reid Health's dedication to excellence that first attracted Muhammad Siddiqui to join the organisation as Chief Information Officer. A senior IT executive with a passion for healthcare, Siddiqui brought over 20 years of experience, most notably at the Cleveland Clinic.
For Siddiqui, the mission was clear: enable caregivers to spend more time delivering patient care, his team had to improve workflows across the health centre. With greater efficiency, Reid could also reduce the impact of industry workforce shortages and rising operating costs.
Empowering providers and patients
Many healthcare organisations are challenged by adapting legacy systems to enable more data-driven decision making across teams. Reid Health had made great strides toward this goal by investing in strategic technology for its operating environment, choosing Epic as its electronic health record (EHR) system. The health centre planned to build on this foundation to offer even greater efficiencies for everyone—from clinicians, nurses, and surgeons to patients and those in the patient transfer centre, facilities and more.
The goals were straightforward: automate manual tasks to free employees to focus on more strategic work, remove process bottlenecks to save time and money, make workflows intuitive and easier to use to improve experiences and reduce costs, and unify siloed applications under one data model to shed complexity.
From a management perspective, Siddiqui needed a system of record for workflows and IT assets to reduce risk and maintain a clear operational view. Each department had different ways of working, tracking progress and automating tasks. This made it difficult to scale operations and could lead to some challenges for staff and patients.
Workflow standardisation was a starting point. Self-service and sophisticated reporting were clear next steps. Moving forward for Reid Health meant doing more with less, rationalising applications and reducing technical debt—with all processes measured by SLAs.
With providers today having more options to deliver care and patients seeking out more options to receive it, Siddiqui charged his team with defining solutions that actively engage employees and empower patients in achieving their own health and wellness goals. Reid Health had to be transparent in all its processes to build trust and ensure that users reported problems and provided feedback. Without this trust, there could be delays in identifying and resolving challenges.
After evaluating options to reliably digitise key processes, Siddiqui identified ServiceNow as the best solution. "We aim to standardise and automate everything with ServiceNow, reducing the burden on our IT operations and improving cost, productivity and experience for all", says Siddiqui.
Flexible, adaptable platform for future growth
Reid Health chose ServiceNow IT Service Management Professional for its scalability and adaptability. Its ease of use makes IT teams more productive, without the need for extensive training. And the large and active community of ServiceNow users and developers gives Reid Health a rich resource to call upon for help.
Designed to gather data for all categories of healthcare users—including providers, employees and patients—ServiceNow Health Care Life Sciences Service Management (HCLS) enables Reid to integrate various organisational roles and services. The integration across HR, customer service, security operations and other departmental functions reduces data transfer and employee training.
For Siddiqui, the unique data model was compelling and it enabled easy integration with Epic and other applications. It also automated use cases that had more clinical impact. "I am most impressed by the flexibility and adaptability of the ServiceNow platform to meet our specific needs for Epic integration and complex caregiver automations", says Siddiqui.
Integrating easily with other core applications
With its unique data model, HCLS enables integration with Epic EHR, driving clinical use cases. The integration provides extensive information about patients and families, the payer ecosystem and the unique provider team delivering care to the patient. With this additional information, ServiceNow supports extended use cases centred around delivery and care—optimising and automating complicated workflows. An added benefit is the ability to reliably generate reports offering insights previously unavailable before the ServiceNow integration.
For example, Siddiqui integrated Power BI for customer dashboards and can run daily reports that show prior-day statistics, such as number of tickets opened, tickets not meeting SLAs and why. The custom reporting took less than 10 hours to develop and integrate with ServiceNow.
Reaching Epic Gold Star Level 9 in five months
Reid Health had an ambitious plan to deploy HCLS for IT support, facilities and credentialing. The team started by defining, structuring, managing and automating IT services. Employees can now easily submit and track requests, and customer service has improved.
The IT team created a knowledgebase, built a self-service portal and automated user provisioning—improving user experience, reducing total tickets generated and saving time and effort. With increased use of the knowledgebase and Virtual Agent, Siddiqui expects to reduce IT service desk staffing, redirecting resources to other activities. For patients using the Epic MyChart app, the virtual agent can provide knowledgebase access, as well as initiate a service request, improving patient experiences.
The team also introduced EMR Help, which providers can use to submit IT service requests directly from Epic without having to switch to a separate application, saving time and further enhancing user experiences. Detailed information about an issue, such as workstation ID, server and patient medical record number transfer directly. In addition, EMR Help enables providers to track service request status and get updates from the IT team.
Siddiqui leveraged the ServiceNow Agile framework and project management in a reimplementation of Epic. The team refreshed the Epic environment to gain greater benefit from its rich feature set. The Epic Gold Star programme rates how efficiently an organisation uses Epic EHR, with the goal of helping organisations enhance clinical and financial outcomes. Within five months, Reid Health reached Epic Gold Star Level 9, joining the top 12% of Epic organisations.
"The ServiceNow project had such a high profile that our CEO, CFO and Chief Medical Officer attended the go-live event, sharing their excitement and enthusiasm", says Siddiqui.
Faster, better services at lower cost
The IT service desk currently handles about 4,000 tickets per month with a staff of 18 agents. "After implementing ServiceNow, compliance with SLAs for response time and resolution time jumped sharply", says Siddiqui. "Faster action means caregivers have more time for patient care". Response time SLA compliance rose to 90% toward the goal of 95% for response and resolution.
Reid saw rapid adoption of the self-service portal, driving the share of total tickets for self-service to 25%, shifting many IT service desk resources to resolving tickets rather than fielding calls. As employees were able to check ticket status through the portal, email-based escalations dropped from hundreds per day to zero, improving response time, enabling complete request tracking and lowering operating costs.
Time to onboard new caregivers dropped from as much as six days to just hours, enabling faster patient care engagement. Medical staff credentialing will be similarly automated, with significant time savings expected. Siddiqui aims to reduce IT service management costs by as much as 50%.
Extending to more use cases
Siddiqui has an expansive view of how Reid Health can leverage ServiceNow. For marketing, Siddiqui sees ways to simplify logistics for events, helping track tasks and deliver effective communications. For Medicare requalification, required post pandemic, ServiceNow can streamline the collection point for forms, accelerating the process. This helps keep patients within the network and reduces lost revenue.
As a member of the ServiceNow healthcare customer advisory board, Siddiqui continues to look for new ways to get the most out of its technology and give providers and patients even better services.
"ServiceNow offers a powerful ‘everything as a service' platform and I envision it becoming a true business centre for Reid Health", says Siddiqui. "We can more cost effectively manage our operations and help our teams stay focused on delivering highly personalised care".