Uplifting digital strategy to improve care services

HammondCare has a long history of caring for and supporting people with complex health or aged care needs. Since its inception as a not-for-profit organization in the 1930s, HammondCare has provided various types of high-quality services, such as personalized home care, residential aged care for people living with dementia, and palliative care and restorative hospitals. Today, it provides healthcare services across 93 sites in Australia.

Like many in the aged care sector, the maturation of its technology systems often takes a backseat. This finding was affirmed in 2021 when the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety report noted that the aged care sector in Australia was “well behind” its peers in the use and application of modern technologies.

In a separate report, the Aged Care Technology Consortium also revealed that there was a lack of digital transformation strategy across the sector.

With the vision to provide the best possible support, HammondCare has taken note of the Royal Commission’s findings. It is now on a path towards revamping its digital platform and improving service delivery for staff and customers.

“We want to put in place the right technology to support carers, nurses, and the people that we care for,” HammondCare Head of Service Delivery, Chris Borg says.

“By providing a platform where our staff can easily interact and stay connected from anywhere, ServiceNow is a key component in our digital transformation journey.”

Building in-house capability for IT service management

Previously, HammondCare was using a managed service provider (MSP) Hosted Resolver Instance to manage IT incidents. But the solution only had request incident management capability. Interactions with the MSP were through emails or phone calls, so there was no visibility for the HammondCare service desk to be proactive in resolving issues. Change requests were executed without pre-approval. This lack of governance control prompted HammondCare to rethink its service delivery strategy.

“We wanted to adopt the core IT Service Management best practices so we can track and analyze our service performance and improve experiences for our staff,” Chris explains.

After evaluating several options, HammondCare moved to an in-house service delivery model by using ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) via the Ticket Connector built by ServiceNow Partner TCloud Consulting. This model includes Incident Management, Problem Management, and Change Management.

“HammondCare is a non-stop business and people in the healthcare industry are busy. They don’t have the time to wait on the phone or for someone to call them,” Chris says. “With ServiceNow ITSM’s built-in best practices on a single platform, agents and staff can quickly self-solve issues 24/7, and focus on improving services for the people they care for. It was a no-brainer.”

Boosting productivity with improved visibility
and control

By building a single HammondCare ‘IT Help’ portal with ServiceNow ITSM, Chris and his team now have greater insight into the trends of service issues (such as spikes in incidents for a care support system) and the longevity of applications. This enables the IT team to take proactive actions to prevent recurring incidents and minimize disruption to carers and nurses.

“With ServiceNow dashboards, we can drill down into the history of incidents and track the status of requests. In the past, this data wasn’t available and we just dealt with each issue as it came along,” Chris explains.

The adoption of the Change Advisory Board (CAB) workbench to review and authorize change requests, it provides staff with the right level of approval policies. Chris and his team can also respond faster to change requests and ensure proper governance control.

“Thanks to the visibility and control with ServiceNow ITSM, we’ve reduced the number of incidents per week by 33%—from 300 to 200—and increased staff productivity,” Chris says. “First call resolution has been consistently around the high 70 percentile since we adopted the ServiceNow instance.”

HammondCare is in the process of building a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) and developing more Service Catalogs and Knowledge articles for the IT Help portal.

“The biggest benefit of the ServiceNow platform is the ability to build a unified service catalog. We expect users from the finance and care support teams will be able to quickly find what they wanted and self-solve issues faster,” Chris explains.

With ServiceNow, agents and staff can self-solve issues
24/7 and focus on improving services for the people
they care for.

Chris Borg
Head of Service Delivery

Improving staff and carers’ experiences

With multiple sites for care services across Australia, staff and carers are predominately on the road and connected to the business via their mobile device.

By turning on the plug-in for the mobile app, service agents can track what tasks have been assigned to them and the status of each request at any time. For example, when a user submits a request for hardware via ServiceNow, this triggers an automated workflow for assigning a task to the right team for approval.

Bringing in Change Management and On-Call Scheduling in the mobile app also enables agents to easily check their shift schedule and manage approval requests even though they are out in the field.

The IT team and business end users are now also much happier since HammondCare adopted the ITSM capability with ServiceNow.

“The most comments I receive from staff are improved visibility and notification. They can now see the full details of the request and know what they are approving,” Chris says. “ServiceNow makes life easier for our staff. This is reflected in an improvement of our Net Promoter Score (NPS) score by 13%.”

Health check yields insights to accelerate improvements

As part of the digital strategy at HammondCare, Chris and his team have started using ServiceNow Impact to conduct platform health checks and security reviews. This provides insight for the IT team to develop a continuous improvement plan for their solutions. HammondCare also leverages the learning credits from ServiceNow Impact to upskill the IT team in hardware and software asset management.

“The overall experience with ServiceNow Impact has been really good. We can clearly see where to focus our improvement efforts across our digital transformation journey,” Chris says.

“Our latest HealthScan score came back in the 90s, so it was helpful to see this positive increase in overall health. Our Security review was around 85 (out of 100), which was quite good and we’ll continue making tweaks to raise it.”

Chris adds: “From a ROI perspective we’re doing much better than before. ServiceNow Impact empowers us to accelerate the outcomes for our digital roadmap.”

Looking to the future roadmap with ServiceNow

With the support from TCloud Consulting, it took about six weeks to complete the implementation of ServiceNow ITSM and another two weeks for the integration of TCloud’s Ticket Connector.

“TCloud Consulting has been a great partner for us. With their expertise and experience in ServiceNow, the process was more seamless than expected. We haven’t had any issues since the go-live,” Chris says.

Next up with ServiceNow will be Hardware Asset Management. Instead of relying on spreadsheets, Chris and his team are looking to use ServiceNow IT Asset Management to track and manage the end-to-end lifecycle of end users’ hardware, including laptops and mobile devices.

HammondCare is also looking to improve IT productivity by using Virtual Agent and continuing to work on providing better reporting to the business. Risk Management and HR Service Delivery are also on its future roadmap together with the integration of ServiceNow with some of the key healthcare systems.

On reflection of the journey with ServiceNow so far, Chris concludes that staff can now easily interact with IT staff and be proactive.

“Without the ServiceNow Platform, it would be a real struggle for our staff. The improved visibility and quality of information made a huge difference in our ability to understand the environment, which helps us to deliver better services to our staff and carers.”

The original article source can be found here: https://www.servicenow.com/customers/hammondcare.html