Seamless and efficient IT operations are critical to delivering quality patient care. Yet, several challenges prevent effective care delivery. A robust IT Service Management (ITSM) solution can help overcome these challenges while enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of IT operations within healthcare organizations.

Common Healthcare Delivery Challenges

Despite the accelerating pace of digital transformation, healthcare organizations face several issues in improving operational efficiency and patient satisfaction. Here are common healthcare delivery challenges:

• Too many stakeholders/systems: Healthcare organizations use multiple systems, including EHRs, patient monitoring systems, ERP and CRM tools, appointment scheduling systems, billing and finance systems, insurance management systems, etc., making patient information sharing and healthcare delivery extremely challenging.
• Poor resource utilization: With several employees, equipment, and facilities part of the healthcare ecosystem, organizations have a tough time allocating and optimizing resources. Understaffing/overstaffing and underused/overused tools can lead to unnecessary delays in care delivery.
• High dependence on manual tasks: Healthcare firms that rely on paper-based recording and manual data entry face delayed decision-making, increased administrative burdens for staff, and challenges in coordinating care across departments.
• Limited visibility into the care continuum: Siloed tools and departments lead to a poor view of a patient’s journey across different stages of care. This results in fragmented care, delayed follow-ups, and communication gaps between various departments – ultimately causing suboptimal patient outcomes.
• System downtime: Lack of regular system monitoring can lead to costly downtime, which impacts not only care delivery but also patient health and safety.
• Difficulty keeping up with patient expectations: Legacy tools and a poorly integrated ecosystem of healthcare tools make it difficult for healthcare organizations to keep up with the growing demand for quick, personalized, and anytime care.
• Delayed claims processing: Complex billing systems, incomplete or inaccurate documentation, and lack of expertise lead to delayed claims processing, impacting overall patient experience and satisfaction.
• Poor issue identification and remediation: Lack of real-time data and inadequate communication between departments makes it difficult for organizations to identify and resolve system or user issues. Errors in patient records or equipment malfunctions can lead to treatment inconsistencies, impacting patient safety and care quality.

8 Areas Where ITSM Plays a Key Role in Improving Patient Satisfaction

Healthcare ITSM directly and positively impacts healthcare service delivery and patient satisfaction. Standardized processes and workflows allow for faster issue resolution, reduced downtime, and improved overall service quality.

A well-implemented ITSM solution also empowers healthcare providers to track service requests through their lifecycle, ensuring delivery. Let’s look at the top ways ITSM enhances patient satisfaction and care outcomes:

1. Stronger SLAs: A robust ITSM strategy enables healthcare organizations to resolve issues quickly and efficiently. By streamlining incident and problem management processes, healthcare organizations can ensure a structured approach to resolving IT-related issues daily. Such an approach to ITSM can help centralize incident management, track progress, and automate escalations, minimizing downtime and ensuring uninterrupted patient care.

When healthcare services company CHG embraced Atlassian ITSM for incident management and maintenance, it could save almost $120,000 and up to 30 hours of staff time per week, which they now dedicate to innovation instead of administration.

2. Better onboarding of new staff: As healthcare staff moves in and out of the healthcare ecosystem, ITSM streamlines onboarding and offboarding processes. By providing standardized workflows and automating the provisioning processes, ITSM tools ensure new employees can access systems and permissions needed to perform their roles. They also ensure the disabling of access to critical IT systems for leaving employees, thus protecting patient data and maintaining healthcare service delivery.

3. Automated workflows: When diagnosing or treating patients, timely access to necessary tools and resources is critical to patient safety and well-being. ITSM systems can automate access request management and have requests automatically reviewed, approved, and provisioned. This minimizes the dependence on humans, enables faster turnaround time, and ensures timely healthcare decision-making.

Castlight Health’s complex IT systems resulted in mounting technical debt, vulnerabilities, and performance issues. Migrating to Jira Service Management has helped reduce costs, eliminate downtime and maintenance, and enhance security.

4. Enhanced interoperability between systems and stakeholders: As the healthcare ecosystem grows in size and complexity, ensuring seamless interaction and integration between systems and stakeholders becomes critical. ITSM enables hospitals, clinics, laboratories, and pharmacies to bring all patient and treatment-related information into one centralized location. ITSM processes and tools allow quick diagnosis and treatment by streamlining communication and standardizing data sharing.

5. Continuous performance monitoring: ITSM tools encourage a culture of continuous improvement and innovation. Regular performance monitoring gives Healthcare staff much-needed insight into IT operations and service delivery. This helps address bottlenecks, capitalize on trends, and identify areas for improvement. Organizations can deliver cutting-edge healthcare services by facilitating the smooth running of critical healthcare systems.

Embracing Atlassian ITSM has enabled Ginkgo Bioworks to offload IT maintenance and improve visibility for more intelligent decision-making – enabling triple the output and half the costs each year. 

6. Improved self-service: Healthcare ITSM also improves self-service through well-established portals. Healthcare staff can quickly access and update patient information, manage appointments, and navigate administrative tasks using predefined workflows and knowledge articles. Self-service portals can also reduce the burden on IT staff, allowing them to manage their workloads better and reduce burnout.

7. Better resource management: ITSM makes it easy to manage a vast array of IT resources – whether staff or assets. From hardware, software, and equipment to doctors, lab assistants, and nurses, with healthcare ITSM, organizations can leverage robust asset and configuration management capabilities. ITSM tools help maintain accurate inventories, track asset lifecycles, and enable proactive maintenance. They also help ensure compliance with regulatory requirements and minimize the impact of issues on critical healthcare systems.

8. Increased security and compliance: As healthcare organizations struggle to navigate new security and compliance regulations, a robust ITSM strategy streamlines and standardizes security practices and controls across the healthcare ecosystem. Applying necessary controls and automating incident response procedures helps safeguard patient information from unauthorized access and breaches. It maintains the required level of governance models via regular audits and compliance checks.

Implementing IT Service Management (ITSM) in healthcare is crucial for improving operational efficiency, reducing downtime, and ensuring better service delivery. By leveraging automation, self-service portals, and integrated systems, healthcare organizations can streamline processes, enhance resource utilization, and meet the rising demands of both patients and staff.

As an Atlassian-specialized partner, enreap is dedicated to delivering exceptional service and support to customers. Talk to our ITSM experts today to easily track, resolve, and manage IT requests across your healthcare organization.