SCL Health Enhances Patient Safety with ITIL Service Management Solution
Are you in the market for a proven IT Service Management (ITSM) software solution that supports ITIL processes? This case study shares the inside scoop on how Ivanti® Service Manager is helping SCL Health enhance patient safety, manage change to reduce unplanned outages, and streamline the services of other departments—including Human Resources.
SCL Health, founded by the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth, employs more than 15,000 full-time associates and hundreds of providers working to improve the health of the poor and vulnerable in communities in Colorado, Kansas, and Montana. The faith-based health leader specializes in heart care, orthopedics, cancer, women’s health, and back and spine.
ITSM Journey
SCL Health began its ITSM journey in 2011 when it merged two organizations, creating a golden opportunity to consolidate IT systems and IT service delivery. It sought out a new ITSM solution that could help the integrated IT team manage incidents more effectively and gain tighter control over changes.
“Ivanti had the most value as far as capabilities were concerned, while fitting our budget,” says Amy Yankovich, Director of Service Operations and Service Management at SCL Health. Since then, Ivanti Service Manager has become essential to manage both IT and some business services—and is an important tool to help protect patient safety where systems and technology are concerned.
Aligning IT with the Business
Patient lives depend on healthcare IT systems the operate smoothly. But even a single flaky printer or flickering monitor can be a problem if it’s not fixed quickly. The stakes are much higher when there’s a problem with a biomedical device or in an operating room. “If you have systems that are unreliable and providers are stressed, there’s a risk that this could translate into a negative experience for the patient,” says Yankovich. “It’s imperative to reduce outages to ensure patient safety and satisfaction.”
To succeed, the IT team aligned itself with the business. “We partnered with our high reliability department, which is typically more focused on all the things that physicians and nurses need to provide really reliable patient care. We pulled their stories into why change management is critical for IT,” says Yankovich
It was a game changer. The IT team was trained on the principles of high reliability and the inescapable nature of human error. “Today, using our change process is like buckling your seatbelt. Our teams at every level respect the process and understand that it is a safety mechanism for us to protect our systems and our patients,” Yankovich says.
She continued, “We saw improvements in our associate engagement survey scores for change management. Our tracked-change volume more than doubled and our change success rate improved by 33 percent. Because of this buy in, we’re now able to use our post-implementation review process to capture data when changes don’t go as expected. We’re developing reports to share these learnings across our teams. We are confident this will further improve our overall change success rates for our organization. Things took off from there.”
Like a Medical Record of IT Health
“Ivanti Service Manager is like a medical record for a patient,” says Yankovich. “We need a detailed record about our systems, applications, and services so we can understand the health of IT across our organization.”
With Ivanti, the IT team has visibility into incidents, problems, and changes, which has delivered results. “Through realizing these processes in a centralized solution, we’ve seen a reduction in our monthly average volume of incidents of 18 percent, and we’ve only just begun,” she says.
“We really just implemented our problem management process this year. With problem management, SLAs are easier to achieve, incidents are resolved faster, and long-term problems are addressed. IT has seen a reduction in emergency changes and created greater accountability for all changes.”
Growing from IT to Business Services
IT’s success with service management has attracted the attention of other groups at SCL Health who are looking to optimize their own service delivery.
SCL Health’s Human Resources Service Center was the first department to recognize the value and uses Ivanti to track employee inquiries and requests about payroll and benefits. The nursing department is exploring using Ivanti to manage requests for the nursing float pool used to fill last-minute staffing shortages. “Conversations are happening about the value of being able to leverage a shared solution to track their services,” Yankovich says.
Service Management as a Strategic Initiative
The benefits of Ivanti Service Manager are compounding. “Our CIO has embraced service management as a strategic initiative,” Yankovich says. “We are formalizing our service design process and aligning our service portfolio with the organization’s services.”
Rather than looking at IT as a collection of applications, servers, storage, and networks, IT is aligning its service portfolio with business functions, such as electronic medical records (EMR), laboratory services, and payroll services.
“The teams are excited about the transformation,” she says. “For the first time, we’re thinking of service management as a true solution, not just a ticketing concept. Senior leadership sees the value and opportunity we have to further increase our value to the business as we manage our services against metrics that make sense for that service.”
Take some time to read the complete SCL Health case study. You’ll also find helpful information on the Ivanti Service Manager solution.