Transforming Hospital Operations: Presenting ServiceNow’s Now Assist for IT Operations and Patient Care
Have you ever considered how leading hospitals maintain seamless operations while ensuring exceptional patient care? Many healthcare organizations face significant challenges in running operations efficiently while meeting patient expectations. ServiceNow’s suite of products, powered by Generative AI, offers a robust solution to enhance both areas.
ServiceNow’s Now Assist simplifies managing regulatory and operational challenges by centralizing critical information, making it quick and easy for employees to access the data they need. This efficiency reduces the time spent searching for information and resolving issues, allowing teams to focus on their core responsibilities. With Now Assist, organizations have saved $5.5 million annually through incident avoidance and increased efficiency by 54%. Additionally, 56% of customers and employees have reported positive experiences using Now Assist.
In this blog, we will examine how ServiceNow’s Now Assist is revolutionizing IT operations for hospitals and healthcare providers. We will explore its capabilities, the potential for ITSM, ITOM, and CSM customization, success stories, and upcoming innovations so that the readers can gain a comprehensive understanding of these advancements.
Automating IT Operations with ServiceNow’s Now Assist
Introducing Now Assist!
Now Assist refers to generative AI-powered experiences on the Now Platform®, designed to enhance organizational productivity and efficiency significantly. By offering improved self-service capabilities, Now Assist empowers users to resolve issues independently through personalized suggestions and automated workflows, reducing reliance on IT support and accelerating problem-solving. Its generative AI engine also delivers faster answers and recommended actions by analyzing extensive data and providing precise, relevant solutions. This results in quicker decision-making and a more efficient organization overall.
How Now Assist Helps Workflow with AI Integration:
How Now Assist Addresses Key IT Challenges:
Hospitals and healthcare providers deal with several complex IT challenges. ServiceNow’s Now Assist is tailored to address these needs and here’s how it helps tackle some of the most pressing issues:
- Complex IT Environments: Imagine a hospital where numerous systems such as electronic health records (EHR), medical imaging, and lab information systems are all connected and interdependent. Managing this intricate web can be overwhelming. Now Assist simplifies this by consolidating information into a unified platform. For instance, it can automatically integrate updates from various sources, reducing the need for manual data entry and enabling healthcare staff to focus on patient care rather than administrative tasks.
- System Downtime: In a hospital setting, every second counts. Unplanned system downtime can disrupt critical services and delay patient treatment. Now Assist proactively monitors system health and alerts IT staff to potential issues before they escalate. For example, if a server handling patient records starts showing signs of failure, Now Assist can notify the IT team to take preventive action, minimizing downtime and ensuring continuous patient care.
- Hospital Incident Management: Dealing with IT incidents quickly and efficiently is crucial in a hospital environment. Traditional methods of incident management can at times be slow and error-prone, leading to extended downtime. Now Assist streamlines this process by automatically sorting and prioritizing support requests. For example, it can detect patterns in recurring incidents, helping IT teams to identify and resolve the root causes faster and more accurately.
- Data Security: Protecting sensitive patient data is a top priority for healthcare providers. Now Assist enhances data security by continuously monitoring for potential vulnerabilities and compliance issues. For instance, if there’s an unauthorized access attempt or a configuration change that could lead to a data breach, Now Assist alerts the security team immediately, allowing them to take swift action to protect patient information.
How do ServiceNow transform IT Operations in Hospitals
In the realm of IT operations for hospitals and healthcare providers, IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Operations Management (ITOM) are essential for smooth functioning. ITSM focuses on effectively delivering and managing IT services, while ITOM ensures the IT infrastructure operates efficiently. Now Assist combines these concepts with AI-driven features, enabling hospitals to automate incident management, optimize resources, and maintain system reliability.
Let’s look at some of its core elements:
AI-Driven IT Incident Management: Now Assist uses AI to automate IT incident detection and resolution, minimizing downtime with predictive analytics and machine learning. A major hospital system that adopted AI-driven incident management saved over 700+ hours annually in risk management. This efficiency allows healthcare providers to focus more on patient care and less on IT issues.
Advanced Diagnostic Tools: Advanced diagnostic tools in Now Assist analyze system performance to identify potential failures before they impact operations. A leading medical center that implemented these tools recovered 1000s of hours of lost productive time by reducing system reset times to just 30 seconds. This solution dramatically cut downtime for doctors, nurses, and other healthcare staff, enhancing their user experience across workstations, mobile, and shared devices. Additionally, the integration of the ServiceNow Virtual Agent in platforms like Service Portal, Now Mobile, Teams, and Slack ensured immediate support and accessibility, allowing healthcare professionals to manage their workflows more efficiently and focus on delivering quality patient care.
Intelligent Ticketing System: The intelligent ticketing system within Now Assist uses Generative AI to categorize and prioritize support tickets, ensuring prompt attention to urgent issues. A healthcare provider that adopted this system saw a significant improvement in efficiency, with 16,000 users benefiting from faster response times and more effective resolution of their IT issues.
Data-Driven Insights: With actionable data-driven insights, Now Assist optimizes workflows and resource utilization, achieving a 25% reduction in incident response times. A leading firm teamed up with ServiceNow to develop a step-by-step IT improvement plan. This plan aimed to cut down on unexpected downtime, make reports better and keep key clinical applications running smoothly. The program focused on understanding the client’s current and old IT systems through data insights, removing outdated parts and customizations that slow down performance and hinder automation.
Now Assist in Virtual Agent: For a leading client, Now Assist, integrated into ServiceNow’s Virtual Agent, has powered over 1.5 million interactions in the past five years, achieving a 59% employee self-solve rate. This highlights Now Assist’s effectiveness in enhancing self-service, leading to faster resolutions, reduced IT workload, and improved user satisfaction. Through analytics-driven optimization, Now Assist ensures the portal operates smoothly, boosting efficiency and satisfaction across the organization.
Transforming Patient Interactions & Customer Service with Now Assist’s CSM Capabilities.
The demand for improved patient interactions and experiences is growing, with 75% of patients now expecting seamless and personalized communication from their healthcare providers. Despite this, challenges such as inconsistent communication, long response times, and difficulty accessing information continue to hinder effective care.
How does a hospital/provider benefit from ServiceNow CSM
Imagine a world where every patient query is addressed almost instantly. With ServiceNow’s Customer Service Management (CSM), this is becoming a reality. Their AI-powered tools use natural language processing to understand and respond to patient needs quickly and accurately. Whether it’s handling appointment requests, providing real-time updates, or answering common questions, these solutions streamline interactions and make communication smoother. Its capabilities include:
Success Stories of ITSM, ITOM, and CSM in Hospitals
A Healthcare Insurance Provider saved over 700 hours and $200,000 with ITSM
A government-sponsored healthcare organization faced tight deadlines for member updates and claims across multiple states, risking hefty fines for missed deadlines. They implemented an advanced IT operations management platform, identifying and resolving delays, reducing failures from several days weekly to zero. They also developed a centralized operations intake portal, replacing inefficient emails and SharePoint with a unified system for service requests. This portal tracked tasks against SLAs for timely resolutions.
The platform further automated incident management, proactively addressing issues before they impacted users. As a result, the organization saved over 700 hours annually in risk management, saved $200,000 by aligning service and regulatory issues, and consolidated 35 project data stores, improving compliance, report generation, and overall service delivery.
Improving Caregiver Experience with 400K Hours of Care Optimized Per Month
By adopting ServiceNow ITSM and ITOM, organisations can reduce the onboarding process from weeks to days, optimize 400,000 hours of care each month, and efficiently support 1,400 new hires.
You can also use ServiceNow’s App Engine to create custom low-code apps. For example, a Medication Administration App can digitize medication records, minimizing errors and speeding up documentation. A patient notification app sends reminders for upcoming visits, enhancing patient satisfaction.
Additionally, an app for managing hospice expenses replaces manual spreadsheets and email, streamlining the process for greater accuracy and efficiency.
ServiceNow Brings Order to a Complex Health System Handling 3.5M Clinical Visits
In a sprawling health system managing multiple hospitals and thousands of healthcare providers, implementing ServiceNow delivered impressive results for a renowned organisation:
- 11 Hospitals
- 3,200 Physicians
- 3.5 million Clinical Visits
ServiceNow’s IT Service Management and Project Portfolio Management standardized operations and streamlined the onboarding of new facilities. Application Portfolio Management rationalized the software landscape, while IT Operations Management and HR Service Delivery further optimized processes.
Outlook and Innovations for Hospitals
The future of hospital IT is shaped by advanced tools and innovations designed to enhance operational efficiency and patient care. Key developments in this space include:
- AI-Driven IT Operations: Leveraging AI and machine learning for predictive analytics and automated incident management, reducing downtime and improving system reliability.
- GenAI Integrated IT Solutions: Generative AI will likely dominate, providing hospitals with tools to enhance predictive analytics, automate complex workflows, and improve patient interactions.
- Project Portfolio Management (PPM): PPM tools facilitate the efficient management of hospital projects, from infrastructure upgrades to new technology implementations, aligning projects with strategic goals.
- Application Portfolio Management (APM): APM solutions will rationalize and optimize the software landscape, eliminating redundancies and ensuring alignment with hospital needs.
- HR Service Delivery: Enhancements in HR service delivery will streamline employee onboarding, benefits management, and other HR functions, thus improving overall staff efficiency and satisfaction.
Conclusion:
In summary, ServiceNow’s GenAI-powered Now Assist is enhancing hospital operations by improving IT workflows, reducing downtime, and optimizing resource management. We also examined how these advancements positively impact patient care through ITSM, ITOM, and CSM and reviewed some success stories.
If you’re considering implementing ServiceNow solutions to elevate your healthcare organization, iLink Digital is here to guide you. This isn’t just a promise—we’ve spent over 20 years as healthcare experts, delivering IT services to healthcare and life sciences (HLS) clients. As a ServiceNow partner, we’ve successfully implemented solutions for a Fortune 15 company achieving incredible results. Our custom solutions are designed to enhance patient engagement, streamline case management, and optimize care delivery. Take the first step towards a smarter, more efficient healthcare system with iLink Digital today!
