IT Service Automation Gives Priory More Time for Patient Care

Priory is the UK's leading independent provider of mental health and adult social care services, supporting more than 26,000 people annually. The group operates 280 facilities, with over 13,000 staff delivering treatment for over 70 conditions—ranging from depression, anxiety, addictions and eating disorders, to specialist support for autistic adults, individuals with learning disabilities, brain injuries, and older people. With hospitals and care homes spanning from Northern Ireland and the north of Scotland to the south of England, Priory’s nationwide and highly dispersed IT estate presents a considerable challenge for their IT organization.

Priory began working with Ivanti in a period of rapid expansion. From 2010 to 2016, the IT service desk expanded from two people to 30 agents handling 400 tickets a day. With an aging ticket system no longer supported by a vendor, IT needed to make a change – and fast.

From out-of-date to enterprise-class

Sarah Nash, IT support specialist, led Priory’s initial adoption of Ivanti, using the on-prem product Ivanti Service Manager to transform their service management platform from out-of-date to enterprise-class.

Service Manager provided a complete lifecycle approach to service management, but it was intuitive enough that non-technical business managers could design services with drag-and-drop ease. Its configurability and support of service management best practices meant that they could deliver IT services at a higher quality and lower cost.

Sarah’s team immediately set off to automate many of the complex processes that were weighing her team down. One of the first workflows to be automated was new user requests, which encompassed multiple steps: setting up user accounts and access, configuring applications and streaming tasks to infrastructure and purchasing teams.

Previously, the site authority filled out a form, but IT often had to call back to get more information. They tried to accelerate the manual process by creating tickets for other teams, but it was confusing for users and for IT. With the team receiving more than 50 new user requests a day, automation was a lifesaver. “We’re 90 percent better than we were before,” said Sarah.

Digital transformation pushes Priory to the cloud

Fast forward to 2020: Priory is acquired by MEDIAN Group, a German company with 30,000 employees across Germany, the UK and Spain. This acquisition sparked a period of further digital transformation, collaborating with the larger entity and bringing economies of scale to the IT team. This ultimately led them to move their IT service management platform from on-prem to cloud in 2024.

As Alex Ares, UK IT Director, shared, “The number of applications we use, from clinical to care, from operational to financial and HR, is quite a broad stretch of them, so keeping them all up and running, that can be a challenge.” They needed a cloud-based service management platform that could keep up with the scale of their expanding organization. Priory’s long history with Ivanti made Ivanti Neurons for ITSM, the cloud-based successor to Service Manager, the natural choice.

Cloud migration unified the IT function across the UK and Germany, leading to better efficiency, access and security for their IT staff and end users. “The best way to achieve [a single way of working] is really to have a single platform, and the cloud lends itself across borders to do that very easily,” says Alex. “The concept that you can use it anywhere on any device in a secure manner is really appealing, and that’s driven our move to cloud.”

Augmenting automations through integration

The drive for automation that started with Sarah continues under Alex’s leadership – particularly automations that take advantage of integration.

One standout example, using Mulesoft, is the ability to create incidents automatically out of care records, which have also recently been digitized. Per Alex: “We’ve got purchase orders coming out of our staffing system for agency spend. And we calculated that just one of those purchase orders was five minutes work for somebody to raise. That then saves that, and we create literally hundreds of them a day. So, you can imagine how those hours ramped up.”

Time back for better care

The automation that Priory has put in place over the years has done more than save the IT team. Centralizing IT in the cloud and creating automated workflows has given time back to the people who are there to care for the patients. “What it’s meant,” Alex says, “is that they’re able to do that job and actually spend less time sitting in front of the PC, which is exactly what should happen.”

_{Note: A customer’s results are specific to its total environment/experience, of which Ivanti is a part. Individual results may vary based on each customer’s unique environment.}