Providing the tools to keep us healthy

Keeping family and friends healthy is a top priority for all of us. Thankfully new, innovative technologies have revolutionized healthcare, providing groundbreaking new tools to achieve better care outcomes. But global events and ongoing economic turbulence have put severe financial pressure on healthcare systems. Now, it’s more important than ever to track, manage, and maintain the millions of vital clinical assets, equipment, and devices to ensure they deliver maximum value, for as long as possible. That’s the global challenge that TRIMEDX is helping solve.

Turbocharging clinical asset management

Industry-leading clinical asset management company, TRIMEDX, supports healthcare providers in transforming clinical assets into strategic tools, driving reductions in operational costs and capital spend while facilitating the best possible patient care. Most of its 3,400 employees are biomedical engineers or technicians, working on site at hospitals to manage and maintain 2.5 million medical devices across 6,000 locations. Not only must all devices be best in class, but they must also be easy to maintain, accessible to monitor, and secure.

To achieve its goals, TRIMEDX partners with ServiceNow, leveraging its AI-driven platform to power its entire clinical asset management operation, which handles 2.5 million work orders every year. To further enhance TRIMEDX’s Customer Service Management (CSM) and Field Service Management (FSM) solutions, CIO Brad Jobe decided to adopt Now Assist for CSM and Now Assist for FSM to drive cost savings and efficiencies. This unlocks the transformative potential of assistive GenAI skills that lay the groundwork for future adoption of autonomous AI Agents.

Keeping everything in one place

Investing in AI is not just an exciting development for TRIMEDX, it’s the logical extension of its ServiceNow story.

“Our business runs on ServiceNow,” explains Brad. “I want to keep everything—data, workflows, processes—all on a single platform, so we can keep building our capabilities. It's easier for my team, easier for our business, easier for everybody.”

This first deployment of AI immediately yielded tangible results. Using GenAI-powered text-to-code capabilities, TRIMEDX’s IT Developers improved productivity and accelerated development of new services and enhancements to the ServiceNow platform.

“From a developer standpoint, the goal is really to increase productivity and keep developing and enhancing our solutions while not having to hire more developers,” says Brad.

Soon, a digital workforce of autonomous AI Agents will directly support technicians in carrying out maintenance on vital, front-line clinical devices in a hospital or a clinic. Using GenAI skills and other tools on the ServiceNow platform, the AI Agents will help technicians instantly identify each device by accessing its full history in the ServiceNow work order.

If a replacement component is required, a team of AI Agents will be able to quickly search TRIMEDX’s supply chain documentation to identify the right component, at the right price, from the right vendor, speeding up the fulfillment of more than 300,000 purchase orders every year.

For more complex fixes, AI Agents will collaborate to reduce manual work, searching historical data to summarize potential causes and provide AI-generated recommendations for troubleshooting. Using ServiceNow’s AI-driven platform to perform root-cause analysis will enable TRIMEDX to improve processes, eliminating time spent researching issues.

“This additional support, at the touch of a button, really enhances the process and the experience for our people,” says Brad. “Most importantly, it enables us to put the device back into the hands of health professionals as quickly as possible so they can focus on providing positive patient care.”

Capturing decades of experience with AI

TRIMEDX’s success doesn’t just rely on great technology—its people are fiercely proud of the vital role they play in the delivery of great healthcare to local communities. They often become both professionally and personally invested in the hospitals and clinics they support, over extended periods of time. Yet, while this level of dedication is invaluable to the organization in carrying out its mission, it does present a potential skills deficit; “With a large proportion of our workforce now in the later years of their careers, the next five to ten years, will pose challenges when these folks start retiring,” says Brad.

“And to compound the issue, the clinical engineering schools today aren't adding enough new workers to keep up with the current pace.”

At TRIMEDX, AI capabilities are helping to capture and retain the priceless knowledge and skills of its most experienced technicians. It does this by enabling the automated summarization of work order documentation and closing notes into bite-sized chunks to be shared with less experienced colleagues and new recruits. These actionable outputs show how AI is evolving beyond better chatbots to serve as an active participant at work for TRIMEDX.

“AI is helping to take that 35 or 40 years of experience that some of these folks have, putting it in a nice, engaging package, and helping that 22-year-old come into the workforce and be productive much quicker than they would have been otherwise,” says Brad.

Marginal gains deliver huge results

After an initial pilot project involving five TRIMEDX ServiceNow developers, its entire team is now reporting a 22% improvement in developer productivity as a result.

“From a development standpoint, the goal was to improve productivity. The positive feedback from our early adopters brought our developer community along and created excitement,” says Brad. “They feel empowered—they could see the time savings achieved by using AI for a variety of tasks. It has helped to create and enhance our solutions faster, without having to hire more developers.”

AI is also helping to secure the skills mix that’s vital for TRIMEDX’s future by providing a simple way of capturing and summarizing the expertise of its most experienced engineers and technicians, creating a constantly expanding reservoir of easily accessible knowledge. 

But the most eye-catching impact for TRIMEDX and its customers is the reduction in time spent on routine daily tasks. Thanks to automatic case and chat summarization capabilities, the time required to read through case notes or write summaries to close a case was greatly reduced, freeing engineers to engage in higher-value activities, thus enhancing the customer and employee experience.

For TRIMEDX, the ServiceNow AI platform for business transformation delivers three key value adds: a reduction in IT costs, improved employee and customer satisfaction, and increased productivity—all of which are achieved thanks to the significant time savings realized. Brad sums these benefits up perfectly; “If we can shave two to five minutes off each of our 2.5 million annual work orders, you’re talking hundreds of thousands of hours saved. That represents a huge impact.”

Integrations unlock additional value

In the near-future, TRIMEDX is also looking into how it can integrate AI functionality with its existing Microsoft Teams and SharePoint systems, using ServiceNow as their AI control tower so employees can search these spaces for knowledge and answers to questions.

“This is another fantastic opportunity, retaining our existing business process while providing a single platform to search and find information,” says Brad.

“We've just dipped our toes into AI, and as with anything, the more you do, the more you learn, the better you get at it, and I expect that to continue. And as the platform and the integrations within it grow, I expect the benefits to just keep piling up.”