Epic Community Connect/ServiceNow Support

[Ben Cervantes]

Hello All,

At our organization we have recently extended our Epic EHR service to additional community clinics. What this means for those that may not be familiar is they will be using our EHR at a fee. I wanted to ask the community if anyone else that also has ServiceNow and Epic has done the same. If so how were incidents managed from these community connect sites? What were pain points? The idea that our organization is working through is having this clinic use our instance to manage their work. The clinic does not currently have any ITSM type tools. The ServiceNow team has advised against simply for privacy reason. 

Thanks!

[Scott Jordheim]

We go through that a fair amount at our site. Some of our items that needed addressing were how much do we let them see on the platform (restrict via ACLs looking at fields specific to their company, etc.)? If they have on site IT (not employed by your company), do we give them ITIL / fulfiller access? Do we create specific SLAs to handle records from their location per contracts? Do we monitor service / application uptime percentage for their location on the platform? We also had to address charging that location for access to the instance between normal end user.

Others have used domain separated instances, but I have no experience with that.

Our main IT can see all information on the platform and isn't restricted down like our managed sites are.

[RyanAshline]

We have been doing care connect for three years this coming August.  Our care connect partners are large heath systems and not small practices.  We purchased ServiceNow just before our care connect roll out and our partner, in turn, purchased ServiceNow as well.  For our model, the clinicians call their service desk which is ebonded to our instance.  It's a bi-directional interface so notes, attachments, user account information everything goes back and forth and stays insync with the systems for incidents.

For request, we have about 20 designated people that submit tickets through our service portal as an end user which routes to our epic teams.

We recently ran into a problem and were told that ServiceNow defines an end user as someone employed by the corporation who is purchasing the ServiceNow licenses.  An audit was performed and they found we had email address that were not our own in the system.  In order to continue supporting an external customer, we had to purchase customer service management (CSM) licenses at our renewal.  it was a much more expensive license but does provide us with a role that is part of the CSM suite that would give key people at this care connect partners site access to the tickets opened by their users.  By default, CSM wants to open a case record that can become something else like an incident but its a lot of extra work and overhead so we will not be using the case record until we can understand the value, but we will use the role and capability that allows a customer to see all their incidents and request.  That will be helpful, and keep us from building a lot of custom ACL's.

I would suggest reaching out to your account team and asking for a demo of CSM.  Our account team and the CSM experts have been great to work with and talk to.  They understand the care connect space and have a lot of customers using CSM for the reasons above.

We do for other reasons do a lot of data segregation using ACL's based on assignment group and customer in the system mainly around HR case management.

Happy to connect a share
Ryan

[jwkline1]

We have been supporting a community connect model in ServiceNow for close to two years now.  We started out with a Service Portal configuration per customer that allows them to submit requests and incidents.  All security is based on company association on the user record.  External users are not allowed to access any part of the native UI.  If they were to try to login to the native UI, they are redirected to their respective service portals.

That was our phase one.  Phase two - we are currently setting up a dedicated instance for external customers and ebonding that instance with our "corporate" instance for our Epic teams to manage fulfillment.  We are going to set the external instance up with Domain Separation and we'll be operating under ServiceNow's MSP licensing structure.  We have a lot of work ahead of us in regards to phase two, but we are hoping to switch over to the new architecture early this summer.

Also happy to connect and share.

Joe

[Ajay Gautam]

We have implemented something very similar to this work using ServiceNow CSM (Customer Service Management) application. The external customers/clinics can submit all their requests/issues using cases on CSM portal. These customers will be able to see only their cases from the portal and can provide additional details as needed. The cases can be routed to Epic support team for fulfillment. If needed the fulfillment teams can raise incidents or requests to complete the work. 

I will be happy to discuss further if this is helpful. 

Regards