IT in Health Care

Download Evergreen's Health Care provider ITAM brief offer here.

Meeting Today's Critical IT Health Care Challenges Using IT Asset Management

Today's challenges to IT organizations supporting health care providers have never been greater. Some of the most important of these include:

• Support of integrated voice, data and imaging systems, all with a variety of software applications and hardware devices.
• Compliance with critical healthcare requirements like HIPAA, making investments in computer systems and software and their security more important than ever.
• Competition for healthcare professionals and consumer business is making it imperative that healthcare providers extend state-of-the-art software and hardware to its employees and ultimately its patients.
• Mission-critical healthcare systems are dependent on 24x7 access to hardware and software systems and software applications that are current and accurate.

The Challenges Are All About Accountability

As challenges grow so do the risks:

• Liability for medical errors
• Maintaining accuracy and privacy of medical records
• 24x7 access to life-saving IT applications

The first step to this IT software, application and hardware accountability, as well as HIPAA compliance, is regular, accurate inventory and reconciliation of software and hardware assets, coupled with standarized processes.

HIPAA and Accountability

HIPAA, or public law 105-10191, requires that healthcare providers employ stringent safeguards to protect patient information that is transmitted electronically. Recent requirements stress the importance of providing hardware and software to meet HIPAA requirements.

Meeting Today's IT Healthcare Challenges with IT Asset Management and HP AssetCenter™

The challenge to today's IT healthcare organizations is focused. How do hospitals leverage control and total cost of ownership over a myriad of hardware devices and software licenses, across multiple healthcare 'silos' while still cutting costs , meeting HIPAA requirements and improving the delivery of life-saving technology to the patent point of care.

Evergreen's No Risk Asset Value Recovery Offer

Let Evergreen Systems and HP Software help:

• Plan and control your software purchases and manage your upgrades and new release deployments.
• Meet HIPAA compliance with reliable, ongoing application release/lifecycle management processes and technology.
• Enable healthcare organizations to become more competitive by delivering up-to-date software technology to users.
• Deliver, update and audit mission-critical software directly to the healthcare professional and patient point of care.

Help Is On The Way with Asset Value Recovery

The Evergreen Systems no-risk Asset Value Recovery offer gives your organization a clear path to meeting these IT challenges by combining experienced Asset Management process improvement with HP state-of-the-art AssetCenter technology. It's a 'no risk' offer that will quickly audit hardware and software license and lifecycle management, reconciling contracts against actual devices and software. It leaves your organization with a detailed assessment of recovered assets, formatted in HP AssetCenter, laying the foundation for your organization's configuration management database and a basis for service catalog offers. See our No-Risk ITAM Offer.

Download Evergreen's Health Care Technology Success Story.

The US health care system faces challenges like never before:

• Rising health care costs
• Strict HIPPA regulations
• Managed care restrictions on spending and costs
• Rapid pace of medical advances outstrips the ability of caregivers and the systems that support them
• Absence of necessary patient information and medical reference knowledge in the hands of medial decision makers at the point of clinical decision making
• Inherent limitations in capturing every patient's full medical background information and making available to medical professionals

Increasingly, the Heath Care industry is looking to IT for solutions. The US health care system needs to deliver the health care provider with appropriate patient information and medical knowledge at the point of clinical decision making and to record clinical concepts and events in standard, legible and computable ways, checking for potential errors during the process. In other words, through the computerization and universal and secure access to all patients' health records, dangerous medical mistakes can be avoided, costs can be reduced and care can be improved. This is the single most important goal highlighted in the President's report on Health Care, developed by the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee.

Advances in communications and computation infrastructure make the adoption of health information technology feasible, and rising health care costs, an aging population and increasing medical complexity make the adoption of widespread health information critical. Now IT in health care faces the challenge of making this ambitious goal a reality.

Read on to see how one large, no-profit, integrated health care system provider used Evergreen Systems and ITIL® transformation to deliver on the promise of the real-time demand for sound medical patient information.

Case Study

Health Care Systems Enterprise-wide ITSM Strategy

One of the nation's largest non-profit, integrated health care system providers, was struggling with the complexity of their rapidly expanding IT infrastructure, an infrastructure coming under increased pressure from the business as both regulations and real-time demand for information increased.

As the company was exploring the benefits of better Change Management and control procedures, problems with critical applications got the attention of senior management and convinced them of the need for a full change management assessment. Evergreen was selected to deliver the assessment, based on their proprietary blend of strategy, process and technology consulting capabilities.

The client, unfamiliar with ITIL concepts, had explored best practices in Change Management and selected CM2 as their best practice model. Evergreen brought expertise in both CM2 and ITIL to the project and combined it with their proven Q2V (Quick Time to Value) assessment techniques. The result was a customized strategic assessment focusing on both change and configuration management.

Assessment

Evergreen's assessment recommended new Change Governance, Review and Implementation procedures.

The key to the project was implementing an enterprise wide process and tool for capturing and managing Change across the entire IS infrastructure. Towards this end, recommendations were made for new governance of Change Management, starting with corporate-wide enterprise change policies and guidelines, to be followed quickly by a communications and marketing campaign that would ensure acceptance and adoption of the new procedures and systems.

Recommendations and Implementation

For Phase 1 of the project, processes, procedures, tools and templates were developed by Evergreen in collaboration with the client.

Phase 2 recommendations extended the new and improved Change Management procedures, processes and tools beyond the infrastructure, into core ITAM (IT Asset Management) processes. That expansion then called for the integration of core Change Management practices with an Asset Management program. This allowed the client to use the Change Management and Asset Management work as the foundation for the development of a Configuration Management system, key to the success of any strategic Change Management initiative.

The Phase 2 portion of the project will link all of the new procedures, processes and tools through the use of a centralized repository, or universal CMDB, for all assets. Evergreen will pull the project together through a bi-directional integration of all of the technology tools.

Conclusions

Through Evergreen's combination of IT best practice and technology consulting expertise, the health care client was able to extend an integrated ITSM solution enterprise-wide. By using a core team of Evergreen consultants, with expertise ranging from process and project management to technology implementation, this client forged an IT strategy that aligned itself with the changing needs of the health care industry.