In the United States and the world over, the healthcare system is under extreme stress due to a shortage of healthcare professionals and increasing workloads. The volume of the work that big hospitals perform simply makes scaling this model for the future out of the question. The only viable way of tackling these challenges is to make the system more efficient through automation. That is why healthcare-focused SaaS platforms have seen exponential growth in the past few years.
ServiceNow is a workflow automation SaaS platform that enables businesses to get their work done faster and in simpler ways. With ServiceNow healthcare workflows, hospitals and other healthcare organizations can improve patient care while reducing their operational costs.
In this blog, we will discuss five common challenges faced by hospitals that ServiceNow consulting services can fix. But before that, we want to go through some background about the need for IT solutions in the healthcare industry.
The urgent need for workflow automation in healthcare
Healthcare is chronically understaffed at the moment. You probably have an idea about that yourself from the news about the UK’s crumbling NHS during the COVID-19 pandemic. But the pandemic only exposed a long-standing problem, which many countries across the world are grappling with. According to McKinsey, solving healthcare worker shortage could eliminate 7% of the global disease burden and add $1.1 trillion to the global economy.
But what’s the reason behind this crisis? It’s a hydra-headed problem with many facets, such as:
1. Aging population
To put it simply, there is a supply and demand imbalance in healthcare. Birth rates are dropping, and the population is aging. There are simply not enough young people entering the workforce to take care of the elderly and the sick, especially those who require special care and treatment.
2. Poor wages
Healthcare is a very noble, altruistic profession, but it’s not always the most well-paid one. The wages of nurses, doctors, and paramedics have stagnated over the years. Governments have also cut much of their funding for healthcare initiatives. As a result, many young people are dissuaded from pursuing a career in healthcare.
3. Overwork and burnout
Many nurses, doctors, and support staff are retiring early or leaving the profession altogether because of burnout, trauma, and chronic stress, which comes with working in the industry. However, this was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic where they had to work taxing amounts of overtime, often under poor working conditions.
Due to these and some other issues, automation is the need of the hour in the healthcare industry. Automating workflows reduces human inefficiencies and allows healthcare providers to concentrate more on patient care. That is why ServiceNow healthcare IT solutions can make complex patient care processes simpler for everyone, including patients, caregivers, and administrators.
Understanding ServiceNow in healthcare
Founded in 2004, ServiceNow has big plans and has made its mark in many industries. It already led the ITSM space, but this year, they launched ServiceNow CRM to challenge Salesforce’s longstanding supremacy. ServiceNow solutions for healthcare providers include both dedicated suites and other ServiceNow modules.
Here is an overview of everything available in ServiceNow for healthcare:
1. ServiceNow Healthcare and Life Sciences (HCLS)
ServiceNow HCLS is the core healthcare suite for healthcare providers and payers. It is built around the concept of connected healthcare because the HCLS module links all parts of the healthcare experience to improve patient care.
For hospitals, it has the Healthcare Operations (HCO) solution to improve day-to-day operations, such as bed management workflows and operating room turnover. And Healthcare Provider Service Management (HPSM) is the patient-facing and clinical support feature.
To enable consistent, unified data across workflows, ServiceNow HCLS provides a data model that uses a combination of tables to store data, such as:
- Patient data
- Provider profiles
- Care teams
- Encounter history
2. Other IT solutions for hospitals
ServiceNow ITSM is the platform’s most established footprint in healthcare so far. Traditionally, healthcare wasn’t a field that embraced IT changes rapidly. Understandably, because you’re dealing with human lives, with so many regulatory checks and balances.
But regulators have finally given the green light to automation with clear guidelines. ServiceNow healthcare workflows use its ITSM and other modules to modernize different IT operations in hospitals.
Five common hospital challenges solved by ServiceNow in healthcare
Behind the harmony and quietness of hospitals, a lot is going on to keep everything in order. Large hospitals perform thousands of surgeries in a year; their ICUs and emergency departments are always filled, and if something goes wrong, such as the outbreak of a pandemic, the scenes can be apocalyptic.
In this section, we’ll list five common challenges that hospitals often have to deal with, and how ServiceNow healthcare workflows can resolve them.
1. Daily operational inefficiencies
Healthcare organizations run 24/7, 365 days a year. Hundreds of activities are happening throughout the day and night, such as:
- Patient transport
- Room cleaning
- Discharge tasks
- Equipment requests
Handling these myriad operations through separate channels like phone calls or paperwork is inefficient. And in many cases, it puts the patient or their relatives in unwanted distress. When someone’s loved one is in the ICU, the last thing they want is to fill in some paperwork.
ServiceNow HCO automates and manages these daily operations for hospitals. These ServiceNow healthcare solutions turn all scattered tasks into automated digital workflows. Instead of lost requests and unclear responsibilities, every activity follows a structured digital workflow visible to all relevant teams.
2. Fragmented clinical and administrative data
There are usually many IT systems used within hospitals, from lab software to electronic health records (EHRs). Most of them are built independently by separate vendors. As a result, hospital staff often find themselves switching between screens or calling other departments just to check the status of a request. This fragmentation slows everything down and increases the risk of errors.
ServiceNow healthcare solutions, like ServiceNow HCLS and Integration Hub, mitigate this challenge. The HCLS module manages cross-departmental workflows, while Integration Hub connects ServiceNow with EHRs. It creates a ServiceNow healthcare data model that is bidirectional to bridge clinical and non-clinical processes.
Furthermore, specialist or niche healthcare organizations, like dementia care clinics, can hire ServiceNow Developers to create custom workflows using App Engine to match their unique operational needs.
Such ServiceNow solutions for healthcare providers help doctors, nurses, administrative staff, and support teams to work together on a unified system.
3. Poor patient experience and communication
It is now empirically proven that the physical recovery of patients is connected with their mental and emotional well-being. They must be given every convenience possible to speed up their recovery. Yet many hospitals still rely heavily on manual communication procedures. Patients are left waiting for answers, and staff spend significant time fielding repetitive inquiries. Poor communication becomes one of the biggest pain points in the patient’s journey.
ServiceNow healthcare workflows use ServiceNow CSM to address this issue. CSM offers Patient Service Center, and AI-powered Virtual Agent as part of its healthcare solutions. These tools allow hospitals to offer self-service portals, real-time updates, and smarter routing of patient requests. Patients can check status updates, submit questions, or receive reminders without ever needing to make a call.
Hospitals, in turn, reduce their workload while improving satisfaction and engagement at every step of the care process.
4. IT service management reliability issues
While IT solutions for the healthcare industry have seen an upward growth, healthcare IT service management (ITSM) is a different subdomain. Traditional ITSM platforms often struggle with healthcare IT bottlenecks, which disrupts care delivery and puts clinical operations at risk.
But ServiceNow offers ITSM, ITOM, and CMDB modules with a specific focus on healthcare. ServiceNow ITSM automates and organizes service requests, while ITOM helps detect potential issues before they impact users.
Finally, CMDB maintains an accurate inventory of all devices and systems. Together, these ServiceNow healthcare solutions help hospitals reduce downtime and ensure technology doesn’t become a hindrance in their work.
5. Compliance and data security risks
Hospitals are among the most heavily regulated and frequently targeted environments in the world. They must comply with frameworks like HIPAA, HITRUST, and GDPR. Moreover, in the digital age, they also have to cope with cybersecurity threats regarding sensitive patient data. Usually, compliance activities are managed through spreadsheets or manual processes, which expose healthcare organizations to unnecessary risk.
In this high-risk environment, ServiceNow healthcare workflows provide better protection against such threats. ServiceNow’s Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) and Security Operations (SecOps) modules bring automation, structure, and real-time visibility to compliance and security. Hospitals can automatically log audit activities, track risks, manage policies, and respond to security incidents more effectively.
Vendor risk assessments, internal controls, and incident investigations all become centralized. This enables hospitals to strengthen their security posture and respond faster when an issue arises.
Conclusion
Healthcare is at a turning point. The pressures facing hospitals today won’t disappear on their own. What can change, however, is the way healthcare organizations operate.
ServiceNow healthcare workflows offer hospitals a smarter way forward. The platform gives healthcare providers the tools they need to keep pace with demand while elevating the patient experience.
At Xavor, we help hospitals and healthcare organizations modernize with ServiceNow healthcare workflows. Our ServiceNow consulting services specialize in implementing platform-specific technologies, particularly for healthcare organizations.
Contact us at [email protected] if you’re ready to explore how ServiceNow can digitally transform your healthcare setup.