Setting up healthcare locations and healthcare organizations
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Summary of Setting up healthcare locations and healthcare organizations
This guide explains how to organize healthcare locations and healthcare organizations within ServiceNow to accurately set up care teams and their operational environments. Proper structuring of these entities is essential for managing visibility, access control, responsibility, and routing within healthcare delivery networks.
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Healthcare Organizations
Healthcare organizations are stored in the Healthcare organization [snhclsorganization] table and represent the organizational entities such as hospitals, departments, or units. These organizations form hierarchical structures using the Parent Service Organization field linked to internal or external business locations, reflecting real-world healthcare delivery networks (e.g., HQ → Hospital → Department → Unit).
When a healthcare organization is manually created, a corresponding business location with the same name is automatically created, establishing a bidirectional link. This association extends the ServiceNow service organization model by adding healthcare-specific attributes like organization type.
Multi-level hierarchies can be created by assigning parent organizations to child organizations. The healthcare organization location association table is a many-to-many table used to link healthcare organizations to their associated healthcare locations explicitly.
Healthcare Locations
Healthcare locations, stored in the Healthcare location [snhclslocation] table, represent physical or virtual sites where care and operational work occur. Examples include campuses, buildings, wings, units, rooms, or beds (e.g., Campus → Hospital Building → Pediatrics Wing → PICU Unit → Bed or Room).
Accurate location structuring allows care teams and support agents to pinpoint the exact location of issues, enhancing response efficiency and reducing ambiguity. Healthcare locations extend the common location [cmnlocation] table by adding healthcare-specific attributes such as altitude without affecting the entire platform.
The Parent location field enables multi-level location hierarchies, and the healthcare organization location association table restricts location visibility to relevant care teams, showing only locations their unit is responsible for.
Associating Healthcare Locations and Organizations
The healthcare organization location association [snhclsorganizationlocationassociation] table creates explicit links between healthcare organizations and healthcare locations, defining responsibility and access boundaries.
This association ensures that care team members see only the relevant common locations when reporting issues, simplifying and focusing incident and request management.
During creation or modification of healthcare organizations or locations, this table is used to establish or update associations to maintain accurate operational mappings.
Practical Setup Guidance
- Create healthcare organizations in the snhclsorganization table, noting that linked business locations are generated automatically.
- Create healthcare locations in the snhclslocation table, using hierarchical parent location fields as needed.
- Associate healthcare locations with healthcare organizations via the healthcare organization location association table to enforce proper access and responsibility controls.
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. The Parent Service Organization field on the linked internal business location or external business location is 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 manually, 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 a M2M table 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