Making world-class healthcare available to millions

Sentara has been caring for Virginians for more than 130 years. Today, it’s firmly established as one of the leading integrated health systems in the United States, providing outstanding healthcare and affordable health insurance plans for millions of citizens.

Its 30,000 dedicated healthcare professionals and support teams operate 12 major acute hospitals and dozens more local facilities, including in neighbouring North Carolina. Next, it plans to extend the successful Sentara health plan business into Florida, taking its mission to improve health every day to an even larger community.

Since 2015, Sentara has partnered with ServiceNow to adopt digital technologies with skill and innovation, to enable its doctors, nurses and care teams to deliver world-class healthcare. Its ultimate aim is to extend the reach of its services and to operate as efficiently as possible, as pressure on finite budgets continues to grow.

“Providing great IT services for our patient-facing colleagues at Sentara, that makes their lives easier and helps them to care for people who are often at their hour of greatest need, is tremendously rewarding”, explains Lynne Richards, Sentara Healthcare’s Director of Information Services.

A single, integrated organisation - One Sentara

Lynne and her team are committed to maintaining IT services of the highest quality and using them to help achieve the growth plans related to the corporate-wide One Sentara programme.

A top priority of One Sentara is to create one completely integrated organisation, operating within a single technology ecosystem while delivering the same consistent, seamless experience for employees, patients and families in a healthcare environment, or as a Health Plan customer. ‘One Sentara’ will combine healthcare financing with healthcare delivery to make access to health simpler for patients.

“This is a huge IT challenge that’s going to take us three years to deliver”, explains Lynne. “We’re going to need the support of our IT partners on what will be a long and complex journey. For that reason, we’ve renewed and further extended our very productive, long-standing relationship with ServiceNow.

“We’re adding new ServiceNow solutions that we think will be vital for us in our future state, to automate processes and provide digital tools that enable us to manage our assets, improve our performance and operate as efficiently as possible. For example, we’re using AI for automation of operational issues that reduce mean time to resolution and the need for human intervention”.

“ServiceNow is the strategic platform that drives all IT activity at Sentara—and it’s the platform that will stitch everything together as we become One Sentara and extend our service into Florida and beyond”.

Enabling informed resource decision-making

Like many organisations, Sentara’s expansion of its ServiceNow landscape is built on the bedrock of years of successful use of IT Service Management. Sentara’s platform includes numerous built-in self-service features, including a 1,500-item service catalogue and Virtual Agent, with surveys showing an impressive increase in user satisfaction rate.

“While we’re very proud of the user satisfaction score, we’re striving to make every interaction a positive one”, says Lynne. “Many of our people are in demanding, stressful jobs and we’re constantly looking to refine and improve our service”.

With the One Sentara programme firmly in mind, the organisation has also been ramping up its use of ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM). Now, Sentara’s entire annual resource planning process is being conducted in ServiceNow SPM.

“Everything is now captured in ServiceNow”, explains IT Operations Manager, Josh Baumann. “This enables us to accurately identify all of the IT activities and resources required to deliver the organisation’s goals.

“It’s pretty impressive to have all that data from 100-plus resource groups, broken down by people and projects, and to provide executives with a summary of that information to enable them to make informed resourcing decisions”.

Automation unlocks precious time for frontline patient care

In healthcare, every second counts. Every minute not spent on administration or IT tasks is one minute more that’s available for frontline patient care. Multiply those minutes by thousands of individual doctors and nurses, and the total amount of saved time becomes transformational.

It was with this in mind that Sentara used ServiceNow to automate the reporting of service outages. “As part of our incident management process we create outage records, which users can see on a self-service portal page”, explains Josh. “But the reality is that most people, when they have a problem, call the help desk”.

To address this, Sentara and partner, 3CLogic, built an integration in ServiceNow that automatically plays a recorded message about current outages to the caller and invites them to select the option most relevant to them, automatically creating a unique incident ticket for each caller.

“Serving the caller this way, rather than talking directly with a help desk agent, can save significant time”, says Josh. “It eliminates the need to take the initial call and, crucially, the need to respond to voice messages left when an incident generates so many calls that agents are unable to take them”.

On one occasion alone, around 80 callers—all wishing to report the same problem at the same time—instead received an automated message and then a follow-up email when the issue had been resolved.

“This is a great example of how automating routine processes in this way in ServiceNow can have a tremendous impact, for users and for our IT organisation”, says Lynne. “Most importantly, it ensures that our help desk agents remain free to prioritise assisting a clinician struggling to access medical records, for example”.

Extending automation, the key to success

Now, as Lynne and Josh prepare for the challenges of One Sentara, planning is beginning to take shape on the detail of Sentara’s extension of its use of ServiceNow, with Integration Hub, Automation Engine, AIOps, Hardware Asset Management and Integrated Risk Management all on the agenda.

“Extending automation in ServiceNow will be critical to our success”, concludes Josh. “The principle behind the call deflection example can be used and replicated again and again.

“For example, we’re about to use ServiceNow’s interactive voice response instance to automate password resets—still the source of large volumes of calls to our help desk. We’ll be looking for every possible opportunity to use ServiceNow to help us reach our destination”.