Amsterdam UMC delivers harmonised IT platform for the future

Delivering joined-up digital services
Amsterdam UMC is the largest hospital in the Netherlands and currently ranks 38 in Newsweek’s 2022 overview of the 250 best hospitals in the world. It also educates the medical staff of tomorrow. Created from the merger of two large academic medical centres—the Academic Medical Centre (AMC) and the Vrije Universiteit Medical Centre (VUmc)—Amsterdam UMC’s operations were harmonised, yet it required harmonisation of its technology infrastructure to deliver joined-up digital services. Its IT departments were prioritised as one of the first divisions to be standardised—bringing two totally different IT infrastructures with two diverse sets of management processes together under one new structure.

“Each academic centre had its own IT system, but we required a new perspective which could only be provided by an entirely new platform. We wanted to unite both groups allowing everyone to let go of their existing platforms and come together to implement a platform that would suit our ambitions for the future,” explains Remo Plantinga, Deputy Director ICT Department, Amsterdam UMC.

Amsterdam UMC chose ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) to harmonise its IT management processes and IT support due to its reputation for quality improvement in services and efficiencies.

Every IT function within Amsterdam UMC moved over to the ServiceNow ITSM platform, including some decentralised IT management groups and departments. While labs and radiology are still supported by decentralised IT staff, they now use the unified ServiceNow platform which provides the same unified service management processes as the central ICT department, allowing for seamless cross-department cooperation.

A blank sheet of paper
As the IT department began to set the standard, other departments followed suit. The EvA department, which provides functional support for the electronic patient records management system (EPIC), also chose ServiceNow as its primary support tool, as did HR to replace its existing support tool. Interrelated departments and projects were brought together in one transformational programme to enhance the employee experience.

IT began by delivering users the ability to provision IT services through a service portal to request standard IT services, such as a workspace or new mobile phone.

“Half of our employees had only been able to use the telephone to request the basics prior to the service portal going live—we now have 60% of our incidents being logged through the portal—a major improvement,” says Remo.

“We also decided to leave the old open service tickets in the old systems and start afresh in the ServiceNow platform—we phased out the old cases and kept the new system as a blank sheet of paper to start from, and that was the right thing to do; it meant all of our data was clean from the start.”

Trusted digital strategy and transformation partner, Quint, played a crucial role in the implementation and was key to the smooth delivery of the ServiceNow solution. Its experts reassured Amsterdam UMC’s IT teams that the implementation of the Now Platform^® would be a success and that there would be no disruption to critical services. Continuity was fully maintained throughout.

Giving back control
A portal to provision service for users also delivers a knowledge repository where information can be accessed to self-serve. This means there are fewer demands on IT personnel to deliver some of the more basic requests, driving down the number of calls to the service desks.

“We are receiving fewer calls about subjects that are covered off in the knowledge base because users can find the answers for themselves. HR tells me it has also seen a decline in calls to its service desk for this reason; it has, however, seen an increase in calls about more complex HR issues. Inbound calls are now deemed more relevant—this has had a hugely positive impact,” says Remo.

But probably the most significant change for users is the feeling of control the ServiceNow platform delivers. Teams can see in real time what incidents have been logged, what they are responsible for, and the response ratios. Where reports were weekly or sometimes even monthly, daily information is now available in dashboards which can be created even by the teams themselves for a specific need to deliver the instant feedback required.
 
“Performance is measured by how many incidents we resolve within agreed service levels—we have a categorisation of incidents from emergency to priority with varying service levels—and during the time of the merger, our 90% performance score was maintained, which is testament to the ease of use of the new platform,” says Remo.

The Now Platform delivers true transparency for employees. Automation is the next phase, with the team having already automated the ability to deliver a functional mailbox to a user in just an hour instead of two weeks via manual processes, whereby someone would request a functional mailbox by email.

The new way of working has been received well and the new level of automation means that personnel are freed-up to do higher-value tasks, including monitoring dashboards for real-time analysis of issues. They now have information at their fingertips that they can drill down into at an individual call or incident level. ServiceNow has been embraced by the teams and is seen as part of their wider professional development.

“The next few years will see us further automate workflows, not only the service delivery to customers but also the automation of server installations and a broad spectrum of other services,” concludes Remo. “It’s a platform for our future.”