Setting up healthcare locations and healthcare organizations
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Summary of Setting up healthcare locations and healthcare organizations
This content explains how to correctly set up healthcare organizations and healthcare locations in ServiceNow to accurately represent your care teams and physical or virtual care sites. Proper structuring is essential for effective operational management, including access control, visibility, issue routing, and reporting within healthcare delivery networks.
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Healthcare Organizations
The healthcare organization table (snhclsorganization) stores the hierarchical structure of healthcare entities such as headquarters, hospitals, departments, and units. This hierarchy is critical for defining organizational responsibilities and controlling visibility and routing of tasks and information.
- Each healthcare organization is linked to a business location with a bidirectional reference, integrating with the broader ServiceNow service organization model.
- Organizations can be arranged into multi-level hierarchies using the parent organization field.
- The healthcare organization location association table links healthcare organizations to their corresponding healthcare locations.
Healthcare Locations
The healthcare location table (snhclslocation) captures physical or virtual care sites such as campuses, buildings, wings, units, rooms, or beds. Accurate location data enables precise issue tracking and efficient responses from care teams.
- Healthcare locations extend the common location table and include additional healthcare-specific attributes (e.g., altitude).
- Locations are structured in hierarchies (e.g., campus → building → wing → unit → room) using the parent location field.
- The healthcare organization location association table restricts location visibility to relevant care teams, reducing clutter and improving reporting accuracy.
Associating Healthcare Organizations and Locations
The snhclsorganizationlocationassociation table explicitly connects healthcare organizations with their responsible healthcare locations. This association controls which locations care team members can see and report issues against, streamlining issue management and accountability.
When creating new healthcare organizations or locations, this table is used to establish their relationships.
Practical Next Steps for ServiceNow Customers
- Create healthcare organizations to define your organizational hierarchy and structure.
- Create healthcare locations to represent physical or virtual care sites accurately.
- Associate healthcare locations with healthcare organizations to ensure clear responsibility and optimized visibility for care teams.
Following these steps enables your teams to manage healthcare operations effectively, improving clarity in issue reporting and operational workflows.
Understand how healthcare locations and healthcare organizations function and should be organized to set up your care teams and the physical locations they operate in correctly.
Healthcare organizations
The healthcare organization [sn_hcls_organization] table stores the details of a healthcare organization in your ServiceNow instance. It’s the authoritative reference for defining the organization hierarchy within a healthcare delivery network, capturing the structure that supports operations like access control, visibility, and routing.
An example healthcare organization hierarchy might look like:
HQ → Hospital → Department → Unit
Structuring healthcare organizations correctly is vital to healthcare operations as it defines the organizational structure, influencing visibility, responsibility, and routing.
Healthcare organization [sn_hcls_organization] table technical details
When a healthcare organization is created, an associated business location is also created with the same name that references the healthcare organization. A bidirectional reference exists between the two tables. A business location is an extension of a service organization.
A healthcare organization is associated with a business location, either internal or external.
It contains specific attributes not found in the service organization table. For example, organization type.
Use the parent organization field to create multi-level hierarchies by labeling healthcare organizations as parent to other healthcare organizations.
The healthcare organization location association table is used to store the explicit link between healthcare locations and their owning healthcare organization.
For information on the fields present in the Healthcare organization table, see Healthcare organization table.
Healthcare locations
The healthcare location [sn_hcls_location] table represents the physical or virtual places where care and operational work occur — campuses, buildings, wings, units, rooms, and other serviceable spaces.
An example healthcare location hierarchy might look like:
Campus → Hospital Building → Pediatrics Wing → PICU Unit → Bed or Room
Structuring healthcare locations correctly enables agents and care teams to reference the precise location of issues. For example, an IT support agent can identify what room in the PICU unit has a broken monitor that needs repair.
By tying work to a specific location, ambiguity is reduced in requests and escalations, enabling for more efficient responses from care teams.
Healthcare location [sn_hcls_location] table technical details
The healthcare location table provides the ability to map common locations to healthcare organizations.
The common location [cmn_location] table provides the basis for location setup across the ServiceNow platform. Healthcare locations leverage common locations to extend the existing data into the HCLS data model.
Healthcare locations enable you to add attributes that aren’t available in the common location table. For example, the altitude field is available in healthcare locations without being added to all common locations.
The healthcare organization location association table limits the common locations shown to care team members when reporting issues, displaying only those that their unit is responsible for. This table is used to store the explicit link between healthcare locations and their owning healthcare organization.
Use the Parent location field to create multi-level hierarchies by labeling healthcare locations as parent to other healthcare locations.
For information on the fields present in the Healthcare location table, see Healthcare location table.
Associating healthcare locations and healthcare organizations
The healthcare organization location association table [sn_hcls_organization_location_association] establishes a definitive connection between healthcare organizations and healthcare locations. This connection determines the healthcare organization responsible for a particular location.
Healthcare locations define which common locations a healthcare organization is responsible for. When a member of a care team unit goes to report an issue, they’re presented with a limited list of common locations that their unit is responsible for. This eliminates the need to sift through all available common locations in the system.
When creating a healthcare organization or a healthcare location, you can use this table to associate a healthcare location with a healthcare organization (or vice versa).
For more information on this process, see Associate healthcare locations with a healthcare organizations