Baptist Health Optimizes IT Projects to Enhance Patient Care

Baptist Health is the leading healthcare provider in the Jacksonville, Florida region and is committed to a faith-based approach to serving the healthcare needs of patients in Northeast Florida and Southeast Georgia. As a non-profit, Baptist Health is focused on ensuring that all its investments are optimized around delivering the best possible level of patient care. The organization has been a regular fixture of industry recognitions in radiology/oncology, surgery, clinical services, and dozens of other patient care disciplines.

Founded in 1955, the organization has grown alongside its community to encompass six hospitals, four emergency care centers, two hundred clinics, and fifty primary care centers across the Northeast Florida region.

Like all healthcare organizations, Baptist has transformed itself to leverage the power of digital information to enhance patient care and operational efficiency. As the potential for digital transformation has grown, so too have Baptist’s investments.

The Baptist Health organization understood that IT projects are like any other investment - they require concerted planning, execution, and assessment to achieve optimum success. By leveraging the power of ServiceNow’s IT Operations Management (ITOM) and Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) solutions and INRY’s experienced solution delivery services, Baptist Health could evolve its IT project maturity in key areas like:

• Demand Management: Baptist Health realized that formalizing the process for capturing IT investment requests from the business could gain better insight into demand and provide stronger governance of the investment process.
• Project Portfolio Management: Baptist Health decided to work with INRY to implement PPM to manage the mechanics of project delivery and roadmap planning to help ensure that IT project investments are planned and executed in the most accountable manner possible.
• Resource Management: Like most organizations, Baptist recognized that its IT and technical resources were finite. By working with ServiceNow and INRY to deploy Resource Management, the organization could enhance its ability to analyze resource availability, maximize utilization, and effectively allocate resources to the most critical projects and tasks.
• Agile Development and Test Management: Bringing the rigor of the software development lifecycle process to internal IT projects would give Baptist Health greater visibility, flexibility, and velocity in its delivery of critical IT projects.
• Timecard Management: Through more granular tracking of time against IT project and investment workstreams, Baptist Health could understand the true cost of these efforts against the business value derived, allowing the organization to assess the performance of projects in its IT portfolio.
• Dashboards and Reports: The ServiceNow SPM solution yields a wealth of operational, financial, and technical information. By providing dashboards tailored to the needs of different departmental personas and levels of the Baptist Health organization, ServiceNow SPM dashboards and reports help surface the most critical information in a timely and transparent manner to inform decision-making.

Over a project timeline that spanned roughly 12 weeks, Baptist Health went to production with an innovative ServiceNow SPM/ITOM solution that brought lasting benefits to the organization and its ability to better manage the performance of IT portfolio investments, including:

• Improved project planning and resourcing to help the Baptist Health organization better anticipate and respond to demand from all parts of the organization. Through better planning and resource optimization, Baptist Health can more fully leverage the power of digital transformation to benefit its patients.
• Tighter project execution to ensure that issues that might derail critical IT efforts are identified and resolved early before they have the potential to lead to costly project underperformance -- or worse, project failure.
• Deeper understanding of IT projects performance to apply cost/benefit discipline to this significant area of enterprise investment. By understanding whether projects have met or exceeded their defined objectives, Baptist Health can make more informed decisions about where to invest their limited resources in the future.
• Better coordination between IT and the business it serves to promote more impactful IT projects and investments that address the organization’s most critical needs. By being better informed by the needs of caregivers, administrators, and support staff, IT can make better decisions about resource allocation and project prioritization.