July 31, 2024: Bill Russell hosts a solution showcase with Drew Koerner, Healthcare CTO at ServiceNow, and Muhammad Siddiqui, CDO and CIO of Reid Health, on the transformative power of digital automation in healthcare. The conversation delves into the practical applications of ServiceNow in healthcare IT, addressing how it streamlines workflows, reduces manual tasks, and enhances patient care experiences. How can automating routine processes improve efficiency in healthcare systems? What role does ServiceNow play in unifying disparate systems and creating a centralized hub for healthcare operations? The guests explore the integration of ServiceNow with EHR systems like Epic and Workday, highlighting real-world examples such as optimizing discharge processes and managing medical devices.
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we are focusing so much on enhancing the experience for our patient. We talk about consumerism and all that stuff, but we often forget about our key providers, right?
caregivers, and my philosophy is very simple. If you create a best experience for your people, they will provide a best experience for your patient.
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My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of This Week Health, where we are dedicated to transforming healthcare one connection at a time.
Now, let's jump right into the episode.
(Main) βAll right. Today we have a solution showcase. I'm excited. We're going to be talking about digital transformation. We're going to be talking about automation. We're going to be talking about ServiceNow and some of the things that have been done with ServiceNow in the healthcare enterprise.
Thanks. We're joined by Muhammad Siddiqui, CIO for Reid Health and Drew you're the healthcare CTO for ServiceNow. Is that accurate?
That's correct. Yep. Been here about six and a half years. Was that VMware before this? I think where I met you and then worked at a hospital system here in Colorado.
So good to talk to you again.
Well, those are two fun companies to have worked for. VMware really transformed the data center and now. We're looking at ServiceNow, really transforming workflow within healthcare and within health systems. That's how I look at it.
Is that how you talk about ServiceNow and what they're doing in healthcare?
It is, and the way we like to think about it is, anywhere there's a manual process, and we have a lot of manual processes in healthcare, whether it's inter office envelopes, month end closed process. I had a friend start at my old hospital last week as a doctor, and they handed him two pagers, right?
Those are the things that we want to look to digitize. And, we talk a lot about the concept of a system of record versus a system of engagement. ServiceNow, we want to be that system of record for IT and be that central nervous system. But we also can be that system of workflow on the back end to route work to an EPIC to keep the clinicians in their main system of engagement, or a workday like Mohamed and I were just talking about.
So how can we make those systems work better?
Mohamed, everybody starts in IT with ServiceNow. Was that the journey for Reid Health?
Oh, so to be honest with you, this is how we have started it as well. Bill first of all, thank you so much for getting me on this podcast. I'm a long time listener and first time appearing with you and answering some of the questions that you're going to ask me today.
Yeah, so we started our journey as ServiceNow with IT operations and ITEM, ITSM and ITEM. That's how we started our journey.
so it was doing the traditional stuff in IT, right? You're routing service tickets, you're tracking inventory, you're doing all the normal ticketing and tracking kind of stuff, as well as maintaining the ITSM models as well.
I assume it's still doing all those things, and then you're just building on that as you move to other departments.
That's correct, Bill. So just imagine that in a healthcare CIOs and many of my peers are, we are focusing so much on enhancing the experience for our patient. We talk about consumerism and all that stuff, but we often forget about our key providers, right?
caregivers, right? And my philosophy is very simple. If you create a best experience for your people, they will provide a best experience for your patient. That's how we started out our journey. We used to have four different systems that we use in ITSM. We have a ticketing system and very outdated Microsoft products.
We have a different asset management system. Now we have a single system of the record where we are not only managing our tickets, we are managing our IT service management. Are a complete Agile shop, so we just finished our Epic refuel project and we fully utilize ServiceNow for that, for Agile.
Microsoft Mechanics And then be able to deliver the project within less than a 12 month as planned. And we will not be able to accomplish that without having a ServiceNow in there to get us a better insight for us.
How does it reach out from IT? Alright, so you're doing the Epic Refuel project.
You have a lot of different departments that you're dealing with. what does it look like for them to interact with it? how does that differ from your team?
So any request that comes to the IT department, Bill, it starts with a ServiceNow. So we have added the virtual agent. We have a self service capability.
A person submits the ticket. That could be a project. It could be a service request. It could be an incident. It is start all from within the ServiceNow. For Epic refuel projects, actually we are going into the refuel with the sprints. So we have an every two week sprint cycle. And I can tell you a Reid Health even our CEO know the definition of the sprints and how to look at the stats of the sprints.
And this is the power of a single platform. And you have a single pane of glass for how and where the IT folks are going. Easy and working on it. That's really going to help us big time when it comes to benchmarking and stuff.
CEO understanding Agile and what's going on in each of the sprints, that says a lot about your leadership and taking that forward.
That's fantastic. Yeah, Drew, I want to come back to you. I'm hearing more and more in our 229 project meetings that organizations are looking at. Filling in the gaps. Obviously, the EHR does some things and the PAC system does some things and whatever, but there's all these communication gaps, workflow gaps moving the data and keeping people informed gaps.
And I'm hearing more and more people talk about ServiceNow. filling those gaps. Talk about some of the areas that ServiceNow is being taken into these days.
Yeah, so I want to key in on a key word that Mohamed said around experience and you'll start to see us, the workflow is starting to become a pretty overused term even outside of ServiceNow, but really patient and clinician experience are becoming very |critical.
And One of the things that we've determined is that, to Mohamed's point, most folks do start with IT service management, but if you take a bit of a step back and the concept of a service request being someone needs to know something, someone needs to get something, or something they have is broken, there's a lot of service requests happening in that patient care process.
And We actually have about 52 percent of our business is outside of IT right now. So whether it's managing HR requests, et cetera, integrating in with the workday, those are the types of things and the mentality that we have now, and I mentioned the customer advisory board that Mohammed is a part of, one of the things that we heard from our, those customers is that 42 percent of a clinician's time is spent on tasks, not related to patient care, right?
Whether it's charting an Epic or there's a slip or fall on the ground. All those things we can automate and hopefully give the clinician the ability with one click say, Hey, there's wheelchairs broken. There's a a slip or fall risk on the floor and embed that even within Epic so that they never even have to leave their main system of engagement, which is of course that hyperspace client.
So as much as possible, if we can give them time back that's my goal with what we do here at ServiceNow.
Forty two percent of clinicians time is spent on non care activities. That in and of itself is alarming given the fact that we have a shortage of not only clinicians but techs and all sorts of other people around the system.
Plus, We're searching for efficiency at this point. I'm hearing more and more that, there's from a financial standpoint, we had the pandemic, obviously, which was a jolt to the system. And then we had inflation and some other things and supply chain issues that were a jolt to the system.
So many health systems are looking for I would imagine, Hey the room is dirty is, should be something that's like a one click kind of thing. Are we starting to integrate anything that can't be done in the EHR where they're looking at, it that level of acceptance in terms of being a, platform for, you say experience, platform for experience but healthcare is really familiar with the term workflow.
So I'd say a platform for workflow as well.
It is, and I think it's again, it's a combination of the two, right? other piece that I would add is, if you take, again, the most common requests that a clinician has, we've actually had a big system in Nashville do this, where We should actually know who they are.
We should know, and it's not, location is very complex too. It's not just a billing center. It is a service line, a unit, a department, a floor, a room, a bed. And then we should know, and even possibly predict what they're going to ask for. And I think back to your original point, There's not enough people to provide care moving forward, right?
There's not enough doctors in the system. There's not enough nurses. And so the only way we're going to get there is through automation and through efficiencies. And so if we can reduce that 42 percent down and say, Hey, give the nurse the ability or the doc the ability to click a button and say, Hey, let's get this IV pump fixed.
That's the only way to do it. And JNI will be a big part of that as well, too.
Mohamed, I want to come back to you, and I want to talk about what I often talk about the fact that CIOs spend a lot of time in the problem space. They are problem solvers. They're constantly thinking, what problems can I solve?
What problems are you trying to solve? with this platform across the health system.
Yeah, so Bill, I think to add to that draw point as well is the core ServiceNow functionality is ability to unify the disparate system, right? So many system of a racket, different data source.
ServiceNow does is creating a centralized hub for managing all aspects for the healthcare operations, from automating routine tasks to providing a real time visibility into the workflow process, right? platform, it does for the Reid health, it offers the self service capability to everybody know where the task is.
So I'll give an example. Right now we are working with a design team with the ServiceNow. And see how can we leverage ServiceNow platform to use our clinician rounding every day we do that, right? So we have a patient experience team who round our patient's room every single day. They walk in there and they're using three different systems to capture something.
For example, a patient is asking, I'm having a problem with this air conditioning is too cool for me or this light bulb is not working right for me or I don't like this blind. What this person does is open up, if something is IoT related, open the ticket in the IT system. Or if this is something related to the facility, they go ahead and open the ticket in the facility systems.
And if this is something they needed from the nursing, they're really going to use a different system. What we try to accomplish, we want to have a single system of the record where they can They have a mobile application that we are working right now, very close to the ServiceNow, and they issue a task within, at the moment, at that point.
They can take a picture, if they want to take a picture, and share with the team they want to get action on this as well. So this is exactly where I see the value comes in for us.
So Drew mentioned, integration to the EHR and some other things. it that pervasive? Is it that easy for them when they're Doing rounding to just go boom, yeah, hey, there's an issue with the light in this room, or there's an issue with, the air conditioning in this room.
How easy is it for the clinicians to interact with the system in a single system of record?
Yeah, so I'll give you two examples Bill, on this case. We've been live for almost nine months. We have EHR help built in with an EPIC hyperspace. For example, if the provider stuck something in EPIC screen, don't know what to do, you can just click on the link and the screen comes up right there.
And we have a life agent who can help our provider. Just imagine that. There's a 15 minute slot for a doctor's time. You know the pressure we have to increase RVUs right there. If he's gonna pick up the phone, calling an extension, giving out all the information where he's at, that's gonna take more than 15 minutes and that's where the value comes in.
Another use case you talk about clinician. Obviously, we are still in product development phase at this stage We have not rolled that out to our clinician yet But I see the big value there because it's gonna be directly integrated with EPIC It's going to be directly integrated with our ServiceNow system in a mobile application so nurse walked into the room and a patient say, listen, can I get more comfortable per a person just going to open the ticket and assign that to our EVS team automatically, because they're all going to be using the same system.
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really interesting and really exciting. I'm thinking through I really want to collect more of the problems, Drew. What's the other problems that people are trying to solve with a ServiceNow, right now, maybe some of the creative things, maybe some of the mundane things.
Yeah, so I think I love Mohamed's comments there because, we built EMR Hub about four and a half years ago and, we want to expand that into any type of service requests. And I think to your point, just to add to some interesting things, we just worked with a big system out on the West Coast and I love the concept of the problem solvers, right?
And so we talked to this. CIO, and we thought we were going to do something around optimizing their discharge process, and what we actually landed on was surgical preference cards. So the preference cards, as the surgeons come in, π are wrong about 20 to 25 percent of the time, and it's a minor act of God to change those.
Again, EPIC is the system of record there, but there's multiple boxes involved. There's a tech potentially. And and when they show up, they have to basically discard the DME and it's a major cost savings back to the supply chain issue you were mentioning earlier, right? So we had no idea that was going to be something that we worked on, but it ended up being managing some of those preference cards with ServiceNow.
But again, with EPIC being that backend system of record. The other one that I'll mention too, which is a new one that we just, launched is the medical devices themselves. So we've been managing assets for a long time, hardware, software, IT based assets, but now, these mobile clinical assets, whether it's a an IV pump, a wound vac, a PCA, again, those I talked to a customer last week, they said, we have 240, 000 assets and I probably know where 40 percent of them are, right?
So to Mohammed's point, wouldn't it be great? If they're inside of EMR Help and Epic, they can take a of a medical device or an asset tag. We know who they are because they're logged into Epic and then we know who's going to get it fixed at that particular facility, right? So that's the type of automation we're looking for.
Staying way clear of clinical workflows, right? So we don't want to be in Epic. We don't want to be a Cerner. We want to handle all of the other tasks that they have to deal with, like that 42
percent I mentioned. So you talked about the discharge process, obviously a clinical process, but at some point it becomes a non clinical process and there's a whole bunch of other things.
So is it just a set of APIs that's passing that information? These external systems and coordinating those activities.
Yeah. So think about when a patient gets discharged again, we want to steer clear of Epic, but Epic kind of ends when you're discharged, right? But there's a number of tasks and workflows that have to be completed.
Setting up a follow up appointment with your PCP having DME that gets sent home, coordinating a ride your medications, prescriptions, right? So all those things, need to still happen, and they're typically going to be in disparate systems. So to your point, that's where we want to potentially pick up and fill some of the gaps that Mohamed mentioned earlier.
And be that system that in that case is going to route the work during the discharge process. And again, we are part of the EPICS vendor services program now. So we can integrate in with some of their private APIs now. So they're actually guiding us and helping us in the process. So those are the types of things that and that's what the advisory board is for too, is to get some of these ideas that Mohammed is a part of.
Can I just add to the same since you talk about a discharge, the one use case that we are exploring right now. On a discharge because our discharge it takes for time for the provider to Return the discharge order and by the time patients leave the building average is a three hours, right? There's a lot of manual tedious tasks.
I'll give you an example Majority of the reason that what we encounter in our health system is a transportation, right? What are you going to do? You cannot really assign an Uber or Lyft driver through the EPIC system. You need to have a system that can go ahead and look for the Uber driver to get that Uber driver earlier to pick that up.
And that's one of the use case that we are exploring right now with the ServiceNow. So when discharge planners are planning all that, they can go ahead and get the Uber ride ready for the patient when they discharge.
that's an interesting use case. I like the way that the systems are coming together.
Epic is starting to do, because of your partnership, you'll be able to start to use some of those private workflows. I want to come back to Mohamed, you were talking earlier about Workday. You don't look all that tired and stuff, so I assume the workday implementation is going well. It's a, it's a big lift.
Depending on what your modules are doing, it's a pretty big lift. what are you trying to figure out in terms of, How ServiceNow and are going to work together.
Absolutely. Bill, in any health system, there are, every single system is very critical. But in our typical healthcare, we focus way too much on our electronic medical record and forget about other systems sometimes, or put that in a back burner.
And I often giving this example, and I heard this in one of the CHIME conference, you have a Ferrari and you're going too fast, but you don't know how fast you are going. And you cannot drive Ferrari without having a good tires. That's exactly the component we need to focus on. So at Reid Health, we've been focusing so much on electronic medical record for last 14 to 18 months.
Now our focus shifted and say listen, how can we maximize our investment and do more of the automation? for our Workday. We just started the project and we are still on a phase zero of the project for Workday. We're going to go live in June of 2025 and we're doing all single module of Workday available including HR, supply chain and finance.
think the thing I like about what's happening, getting so focused on platforms at this point and ServiceNow is becoming that system that's able to track and get things done within the health system across the board. And it just becomes another tool to the problems that, we're sitting around trying to solve problems and I liked having the platforms where I could go, we have to go out to Uber.
It's ServiceNow. Oh yes. We have to connect to that system. It's ServiceNow. Oh yes. We have to automate that. Yeah. It's ServiceNow. And so it just becomes a de facto standard across the board. Were mentioning earlier marketing and accounting. What does it look like as you've expanded into those places?
Yeah, so Bill, I want to add one other thing. We don't have any shortage of technology. We have enough technologies that are out there. I'll give you an example. When we decided to go with a Workday, we decommissioned seven third party applications. When we fully implemented Epic Refuel, from Gold Star 3 to Gold Star 10, I think we discontinue around four different applications.
We are doing a consolidation and doing a hyper automation at the same time for our application. Answer to your question about marketing. Every single request comes in. We have a very small lean team for the marketing. We used to get the requests coming through the email. Nobody knows how to track that.
So we build an automation workflow process within a system in ServiceNow that our marketing team is using. The same applies to our accounting team. So any request comes in to create a new vendor in a system, the request comes into the ServiceNow. Any additional report coming from our financial decision support, it comes to ServiceNow as well, and it's all self service.
Yeah, that's fantastic. What am I not seeing? What else is going on? give you the last word there, Drew.
Yeah, I think just from the big picture point of view, we always approach things modularly, right? And so to Mohamed's point, I just in my last focus group at QIIME, I remember, there's probably a thousand different combinations of technologies that the CIOs can use to solve a problem, right?
And so we never want to come in and say you have to do it all with us, right? And Workday is a good example of that. We're Workday customers here at ServiceNow. So even me as a manager of employees, again we never see Workday except for when we have to do reviews and things like that.
At the end of the day, and if you even go back to what we were talking about from the standpoint, They actually don't care what system they're going to interact with. They shouldn't even know that they're in ServiceNow or in workday. they shouldn't really know. They just know, Hey, I need to know what is my pay time off policy.
Hey, what is, I'm taking a leave of absence. And so we can handle a lot of those. Again, we don't want to be that ERP. We don't want to be that human capital system, those are the types of things where, to your point earlier, that experience is, let's go and try to figure this out as fast as possible so that I can go back and do the real work, which is taking care of those patients.
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