Omnicare integrates approach to pharmacy services with ServiceNow

Omnicare sees outsourcing IT services as an opportunity to connect people with the care they need
For more than three decades, Omnicare has been a leading provider of pharmacy services to the senior care industry. The company operates in over 200 locations across the United States, supplying long-term care facilities and independent senior populations with a broad array of specially packaged medications and pharmacy-related services to help move patients toward healthy choices.

As a healthcare leader, Omnicare is committed to technological innovations that grow the business and benefit customers. A well-connected operations and pharmacy services team is key, but many of its technical employees were tied up managing the existing IT environment. With more than 1,500 servers and 12,000 desktops to look after, many of the company’s technical employees’ time was spent managing the existing IT environment.

To address this issue, Omnicare decided to outsource the day-to-day management of its IT services and infrastructure. This would free up internal technical team members for high-value strategic, pharmacy services initiatives. Omnicare utilizes three main service providers—one for the support and maintenance of its voice/data network, one for its PC refresh program, and a third for the 7x24x365 support and maintenance of Omnicare’s applications, data center infrastructure, and the service desk.

Full visibility into service provider environments is essential for Omnicare to maintain high service levels
However, there was one major proviso. Omnicare’s existing IT team already provided extremely high service levels—and these service levels had to be maintained. To ensure this, Omnicare needed end-to-end visibility and control of its service providers. The company also had to make outsourcing transparent to its users, so that the pharmacy service experience was unaffected.

Kim Liston, Senior Director, IT Service Management at Omnicare, says that, “My philosophy on IT customer service is straightforward. There’s one place to contact, and that’s the service desk. It’s up to the service desk to solve the customer’s problem. It doesn’t matter if there are multiple vendors involved—services have to be seamlessly integrated from the end user’s perspective.”

Omnicare expands use of ServiceNow to integrate and manage its outsourced environment
Omnicare chose the Now Platform to provide this multi-vendor service integration and management (SIAM). Omnicare already used ServiceNow for incident management, problem management, configuration management, service catalog, and more—making it an obvious choice for managing its outsourced environment.

Kim continues, “We didn’t have to start from scratch—we already had a solid, consistent foundation in place.”

ServiceNow provides a single, efficient service delivery platform, improving resolution rate
Today, the Now Platform manages Omnicare’s multi-vendor outsourcing environment, providing a comprehensive service integration and management (SIAM) solution. For example, when a user reports an incident via the ServiceNow self-service portal, ServiceNow routes the incident to the correct outsourcing vendor.

In some cases, ServiceNow sends the incident over a web services interface to the vendor’s own management system, and in other cases the vendor uses Omnicare’s ServiceNow system directly. Once the vendor resolves the incident, ServiceNow is updated and the incident is closed. A similar approach is used for service requests, including obtaining necessary approvals.

Throughout this process, ServiceNow tracks the incident’s or request’s progress, using best practices such as timestamping handoff points between vendors—including when multiple vendors are involved.

According to Kim, “ServiceNow shows us which vendor owns an incident or request at any given time—so there’s no finger-pointing or confusion. We get accurate SLA reporting for each vendor, along with detailed metrics that let us pinpoint and resolve issues. And the results have been extraordinary—for example, our first-contact resolution rate has actually gone up from 85% to 90.1%.”

ServiceNow helps Omnicare make continuous service improvements and manage vendor relationships
ServiceNow SIAM capabilities extend beyond incidents and service requests. Today, Omnicare also uses ServiceNow to manage problems across vendors. Once Omnicare creates a problem record in ServiceNow, it then assigns tasks to individual vendors, along with follow-up dates. This allows them to drive problem resolution, continuously improving the quality of the services they deliver.

Omnicare also uses ServiceNow to track assets across vendors. For instance, it tracks laptops as they are purchased by Omnicare, shipped to the desktop outsourcer’s depot, and then issued to Omnicare users.

ServiceNow helps Omnicare manage its contractual and financial relationships with its providers of outsourced services. As an example, Omnicare uses ServiceNow data to reconcile monthly invoices received from outsourcing vendors.

Enhancement requests are another key area. When Omnicare asks an outsourcing vendor to add new functionality to a system, the vendor records the time spent on the enhancement directly against the corresponding service request in ServiceNow.

Kim sums it up this way, “With IT outsourcing, you must have consistent maintenance and support processes—with measurement points at every step along the way. ServiceNow lets us drive these processes across vendors and gives us the visibility we need to deliver high-quality services to our users.”

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