IBM Service Management Revitalizes Healthcare

Improve service management and render better care

Tivoli Beat - A weekly IBM service management perspective. For virtually every organization today, optimized service management is a smart investment. When the services delivered closely match the services customers require, customer satisfaction will translate naturally into business success, even in today’s economy.

Enhancing overall service management will mean different things in different industries, however. Unique complexities must be weighed and addressed in each case.

Healthcare, for instance, is an industry currently confronted by a range of special complexities that require new strategies—and new solutions to execute them. Among others, electronic health record management is a challenge which health care providers must address by securing records more effectively, to ensure client privacy, clinical efficiency, and regulatory compliance. Security plays a part in access management as well; for providers to render best-in-class service, they need both physical and logical access to essential medical information, even when that access takes place across organizational boundaries. Clinical applications must be monitored and managed better, so as to increase medical application performance and uptime, while also decreasing operating costs. Asset management, too, is a common challenge for healthcare providers; to get the best return on investment from their assets, and also improve the quality of asset-driven services, they need a new, integrated approach to manage assets from end to end, and at every stage in their lifecycles.

Fortunately, IBM has recently released a compelling new offering—IBM Service Management for Healthcare —intended to help hospital providers to accomplish these many goals. This modular offering, driven by key IBM Tivoli tools and technologies, can lead to key improvements in Visibility (tracking service performance and enhancing patient focus), Control (rendering more effective service governance, and diminishing operational risk) and Automation (delivering faster, more consistent services).

The overall result? Healthcare service management will be enhanced in many dimensions—all of them favorable to both providers and patients. Services rendered will be higher in quality and lower in cost, yet targeted to suit the specific issues of individual patients, thus delivering exactly the kind of customized, efficient and cost-effective service virtually all patients want, and all providers want to deliver.

Application performance: Making sure that applications are alive and well

“These…solutions help healthcare providers to more easily and securely centralize access to their data, applications and services while also simplifying regulation compliance. And, perhaps most importantly, they improve the overall quality of patient care by verifying that the right people get the right access to the right medical resources.” In many organizations, application availability might be described informally as a matter of life and death. In the case of healthcare providers, that description can actually become literal. For hospital IT departments, it is absolutely critical to establish on a continual basis just how the IT infrastructure is changing, how application performance and availability is changing, and what the impact is (or will soon be for) the medical services those applications support.

IBM Service Management for Healthcare addresses these concerns via a variety of tools and technologies that not only track and report on infrastructure health, but also create the actionable intelligence needed to improve it over time. These goals are accomplished through an integrated, clinical IT services health status dashboard used to monitor both services and their underlying resources.

Thanks to the included IBM Tivoli solutions, hospitals can track infrastructure changes in terms of fine technical details—storage availability, system processor utilization and others—or a more abstract, consolidated view of performance and availability that stems from such metrics. Furthermore, they can drill down to any desired level of abstraction in between to isolate the root cause of application problems. Once armed with this knowledge, IT operations teams can then swiftly and accurately resolve those problems—in many cases, before any measurable impact on services can be detected. In short, healthcare facilities get a quick and easy way to visualize real-time changes, determine their service impact and prioritize responses for an optimized outcome.

The benefits of this approach are substantial. Not only do application performance and availability climb, leading to superior services for patients, but also providers reduce clinical risk and operational costs while positioning themselves well for future growth. This can be seen as a result of higher customer satisfaction levels.

And because services cost less, hospitals have more resources to create and deliver new services in accordance with clinical requests—thus optimizing service management in yet another way.

Health record management: Bringing the pieces together

The manner in which healthcare providers manage patient records has received considerable attention of late from the general public, from the media and even from the highest levels of government.

In the past, patient record management has often been driven by an ad hoc strategy involving a considerable diversity of media and document types and only loosely and inconsistently integrated. This must change in the years to come. Healthcare providers will need to consolidate medical records digitally to achieve compliance with the growing number of government regulations—particularly for complex and controlled documents such as physicians orders and digital signatures—and to drive higher service levels for patients, whose treatment depends on complete and accurate records.

Healthcare providers must therefore improve their efficiency and consistency in managing patient records through both revised processes and the infrastructure needed to support them. They will typically need a single, complete view of patients, rather than a loose collection of disconnected documents, to reduce errors in diagnosis and treatment. They will also need to improve their ability to comply with relevant government regulations, such as HIPAA Privacy and Security, to demonstrate that compliance on demand, in the event of an audit, through a suitable trail.

Toward these ends, IBM Service Management for Healthcare includes many powerful tools and technologies designed to help organizations optimize the technical infrastructure and, in this way, more easily address many concerns relating to electronic records.

Encryption secures record contents; encryption keys are then centrally maintained using a secure solution that can be managed from a single point of control. Storage assets on which medical records are kept, too, can be managed more effectively—essentially transforming storage into a fluid resource that can be allocated when and where it is required throughout the infrastructure, on demand. And security and compliance tools help by proactively reducing the odds of unauthorized access to patient records, enforcing security policies consistently and generating custom reports whenever needed to demonstrate regulation compliance has been achieved—quickly and transparently.

Access management: Shutting the door on intruders

Closely related to health record management, of course, is access to those records. For hospitals to fulfill patient expectations, they must be able to restrict access to records solely to authorized parties, and only with authorized privileges to read, write, or copy information.

Additionally, should patients require it, healthcare providers must find new ways to grant secure access to authorized third parties (external providers). This introduces a significant new wrinkle of complexity; traditional access management strategies and solutions may not have been designed ideally for cross-organization information-sharing conducted by way of the public Internet. Sharing medical information in this manner, though increasingly necessary, makes access management a much more difficult puzzle to solve.

IBM Service Management for Healthcare makes that solution possible thanks to many powerful, proven tools and technologies designed to facilitate information-sharing while minimizing the odds of a security breach.

Identity management tools, for instance, help by automating, auditing, and managing access rights for clinicians and contract staff; user accounts can be created and managed over their full lifecycles through consistently-enforced security policies that map closely to provider workflows. Identities existing in disparate information pools can also be federated, and managed on that basis. This technology is helpful for securely providing access to key clinical systems for external partners as well as data sharing for payers and other Health Information Exchange constructs.

Single sign-on tools contribute by empowering designated parties, such as remote physicians, to connect securely to information repositories (through multiple layers of authentication if necessary), and thus obtain complete access to essential medical information. And security event information tools can capture user activity across applications, databases, and operating systems, as well as security-centric solutions, to support real-time threat management through automated alert generation (if a threat exists).

Together, these and other solutions help healthcare providers more easily and securely centralize access to their data, applications, and services while also simplifying regulation compliance. And, perhaps most importantly, they improve the overall quality of patient care by verifying that the right people get the right access to the right medical resources.

Asset management: Leveraging assets for best value

Getting an improved business outcome, and achieving the highest level of service for patients, will require most healthcare facilities to take a second look at how their assets are managed.

Part of the difficulty of this task lies in the extraordinary diversity of assets in place. All assets—both network enabled and disconnected—must be properly deployed, configured and maintained, at every stage from acquisition to sunset. Such a goal can imply many different things. Many medical instruments, for instance, must be calibrated in accordance with a predetermined schedule in order to ensure they are sufficiently accurate to render high-quality service to patients. IT assets must be continually monitored for health status and updated to suit changing technical conditions or goals. Ideally, best practices models and frameworks would be integrated as well, to take advantage of proven strategies designed to leverage assets for highest return on investment as well as lowest overall cost of ownership. And here, too, regulations must be considered; healthcare facilities need to verify that their assets are managed in such a way as to adhere to regulatory requirements from any governing source.

For these and many other reasons, IBM has included, as part of IBM Service Management for Healthcare, a range of tools capable of delivering integrated, best-of-breed asset management—across both IT and non-IT assets—under a single pane of glass.

IBM Maximo offerings, for instance, provide general asset management features, medical instrument calibration and mobile solution management functionality. Also included is IBM Tivoli Asset Management for IT, a powerful tool designed to make it easy and cost-effective to track and monitor IT assets (as well as attend to related complexities such as software licensing) for the best possible ROI. And thanks to IBM Tivoli service desk features, technical problems can easily and quickly be reported to IT staff for a prompt and effective diagnosis, treatment and resolution.