The Customer
NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital (NYP) is ranked the #1 hospital system in New York and the #4 best hospital in the United States.
With multiple locations across the New York Metropolitan Area, NYP has 2,600 beds, over 6,500 affiliated physicians, over 20,000 employees, and sees more than 2 million visits annually. In addition to their own locations, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital collaborates with two Ivy League medical schools: Weill Cornell Medicine (WCM) and Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC).
The Challenge
Given their collaboration with WCM and CUIMC, NYP needed a solution that would effectively manage Incident records across all three institutions' separate ServiceNow instances while improving the end-user experience.
While they were using ServiceNow for Incident and Request functions previously, NYP faced three major pain points with their ServiceNow instance:
- Service Desk staff could not manage and/or triage Incident tickets effectively across the three institutions. Getting updates and resolving an incident was often a cumbersome task and resulted in a negative end-user experience. For example, if an Incident was opened by a doctor or staff member in the NYP instance, but was actually an Incident relating to WCM, there was no effective way to triage that incident from the NYP help desk to the WCM help desk. By the time it was eventually triaged, valuable time had been lost.
- Users experienced a lack of search and traceability. There was no intuitive way to track or update newly-created Incidents in another institution’s instance. For example, given the same scenario above, once an Incident was eventually triaged to the correct help desk, there was no effective way for either help desk to track work notes, communications, or updates.
- Service Desk staff at each institution used email and phone communications to transfer Incidents, which required the assistance of the other institution(s). The teams needed a faster, more effective way to relay information without the need of assistance by the other institutions.
NYP needed a solution that would allow its doctors and teams to communicate fluidly between the three institutions and be simple for their Service Desk staff to utilize. Additionally, while collaboration between institutions is generally a good thing, the frequent need for complex and institution-dependent task coordination often posed time-consuming roadblocks.
The challenges extended beyond the technical solutions needed among the three institutions. Their development teams didn't have a seamless and standardized way to work together, so they required guidance around best practices related to remote collaboration and development. This is where GlideFast was able to step in and provide much-needed support and expertise through project management best practices and on-site workshops.
The Solution
GlideFast Consulting and NYP partnered together along with collaboration from WCM and CUIMC to create solution requirements and develop a proof of concept that leverages the ServiceNow Incident workflows. With the help of Glidefast’s Project Management consulting services, the teams successfully worked through each pain point as they gathered during on-site and virtual workshops and meetings.
The agreed upon primary requirements included:
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The ability to transfer Incident records across the three institutions
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The ability to keep select fields on Incident records in-sync across the three institutions
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The ability to search for Incident records across the three institutions by user ID or Incident number
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The ability to post Work Notes and Comments from within the search tool
The GlideFast Consulting team proposed a two-pronged solution: Search and Transfer capabilities.
The search function would be a configuration-based setup with a single page application. It provides the ability for Service Desk users to search Incidents opened in other institutions by Incident number or unique organization ID by REST API.
When an Incident is populated into the Search field and it is selected, a full history of worknotes, transfer information, and updated information is available within the Incident file. The Search tool also displays how many times an Incident has been transferred and which institutions it applies to.
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Transfer
The transfer function would also be a configuration-based setup. User Interface actions on the Incident form would allow users to transfer Incidents and REST API would be leveraged to transfer the data between the institutions.
In order to keep the original information in an Incident consistent as it is passed to and from each institution, they implemented a feature to make certain fields read-only, with the exception of worknotes and comments. These two fields allow synced free-text, to allow for easy communication regarding updates and Incident history referencing.
Custom fields within the transfer form were created to allow teams to see important pieces of information such as the source of the Incident and its destination.
Results
In just three short months, the GlideFast Consulting team completed the creation of seamless Incident record transfers and enhanced search capabilities.
In order to ensure the solution was refined, successful, and inclusive of all three institutions, three separate iterations were released before landing on a final product that perfectly solves the major pain points.
Today, the three medical institutions are using ServiceNow to transfer an average of 300-500 incidents per month. As a result of this solution, the efficiency of the Service Desk has increased by about 25%.
The GlideFast Consulting team continues to work with NewYork Presbyterian Hospital and its partnering institutions to further enhance the capabilities of these Incident transfers on an ongoing basis.
300-500Incidents transferred per month |
25%Increase in ServiceDesk efficiency |
