Keeping Americans healthy at home
Amedisys is one of the largest healthcare at home and hospice care providers in the United States, delivering world class services to citizens in 37 states and the District of Columbia.
Receiving care, rehabilitation and medical services at home allows patients the personalized support they need in familiar surroundings, helping to maintain independence and family and social connections.
Staying at home has also been shown to produce excellent health outcomes at lower cost to both individuals and the health economy. Operating from 532 care centers around the country, Amedisys’ clinicians and caregivers visit more than 465,000 patients in their homes every year performing more than 11.2 million visits annually.
Centralizing and standardizing IT support
As a large and highly dispersed organization, Amedisys uses digital technologies to equip its people to provide great services, to attract and retain high quality staff, and to drive business efficiencies and cost savings.
Explains Chief Technology Officer, Keith Blanchard: “My job is to equip our people with the right tools for them to be successful in their roles and to help provide the high-quality care that we have built our reputation on.”
When the organization’s legacy IT service management platform could no longer meet the evolving needs of frontline staff or corporate teams at its Baton Rouge headquarters, Keith Blanchard decided to centralize and standardize its support operations using ServiceNow.
“We had accumulated a lot of technical debt and customization and we needed to simplify our support operations,” says Keith Blanchard. “At a time when we’re asked to do more with less, we needed a platform and a partner to grow with us and support us over time, freeing up capacity and reducing administration through automation.”
Deploying ServiceNow IT Service Management Pro, Keith Blanchard and his team reduced ticket volumes by 45% in the first year. “There’s no way we could have achieved that without ServiceNow,” he says. But the vision behind the move to ServiceNow was not just about improving IT capabilities, but to unlock benefits for other departments too.
“With ServiceNow, we can take advantage of the workflow and automation capability that the platform offers, combined with the insight and intelligence within it, to benefit our organization as a whole.
“For example, we are building our knowledge management system in ServiceNow and starting to leverage that knowledge across different parts of our organization. Now, in the event of acquisitions or integrations for example, we have that built-in knowledge already in our ecosystem.”
Cutting costs while improving patient care
While ITSM Pro is used primarily by the Amedisys enterprise solutions team, there are also users in several different departments. Self-service is not only significantly reducing ticket volumes but mean time to resolution (MTTR) too.
“We’ve reduced our annual support budget for tier one services by $750,000, and reinvested that into other capabilities, including ServiceNow, all with the aim of improving clinicians’ work environment and ultimately patient care.
“ServiceNow Virtual Agent is making a valuable contribution too, providing instant answers to simple questions, not just IT related but in HR too, about vacations, for example. Empowering Virtual Agent with Now Assist for ITSM (generative AI) will extend these capabilities to valuable business-related topics, such as the processes around invoicing, for example.”
Integration unlocks savings and efficiencies
ServiceNow’s ease of integration with many other technologies and systems is another point of difference for Keith Blanchard. “Automation Engine has been an immediate help for us. By enabling us to integrate with Microsoft Intune and Entra ID we’ve created what we call a ‘device pool’. When an employee leaves, managing the process of recovering devices and sending them back to IT to be prepared for future redeployment can be slow, time-consuming and costly.”
With ServiceNow, Intune and Entra ID operating in tandem, the secure access authentication, cleansing and preparation of the device is carried out remotely.
“It’s been an immediate time-saver for our management staff in our care centers and a major success for IT as we’ve saved thousands of dollars in shipping costs. And now we’re always ready to equip new starters with the equipment they need from day one.”
Amedisys is also embracing artificial intelligence to support its clinical staff to deliver high quality patient care. “Generative AI in ServiceNow can provide better, faster results, not just in IT, but more broadly, in clinical operations, revenue recovery, HR and other departments.
“One of the great benefits I see is the ability for it to quickly summarize ticket case notes and provide insight and intelligence on what support staff are looking at from a ticket perspective. This saves time and makes them more productive and helps new team members coming into support to get up to speed quickly.”
Maximizing patient-facing time for caregivers
The Amedisys mission is to be the leader in healthcare in the home. According to Keith Blanchard, a key to the successful achievement of that mission is to use core platforms like ServiceNow’s to maximize the time that clinicians and caregivers spend with patients and their families, enhancing the experience and optimizing health outcomes.
“We know that in ServiceNow we can automate a process that might take three days today and reduce that down to one that takes two hours. For example, requests for updates and changes in a physician’s files are now automated and fulfilled with very minimal input from them. Making things like this as simple and fast as possible means that they’re free to get back out, providing the high-quality care that we pride ourselves on.”