Clarian Health

Healthcare IS Team Automates Policy Management for $145,000 Cost Savings

When attempting to respond to user needs, members of the Information Systems department for Indiana healthcare provider Clarian Health had no single place to look for applicable policies and procedures. Nor did the department have a defined process for the creation of new procedures. Clarian Health then deployed a solution based on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007, resulting in a more efficient way to manage its documentation and an annual savings of U.S.$145,000.

 

Business Needs

The 11,000 employees of Clarian Health strive to provide best-in-class healthcare for the organization’s more than one million patients. Clarian Health takes advantage of computer technology to support this high standard of care, relying on its Information Systems (IS) department to provide and maintain the systems that keep its five hospitals running smoothly.

It’s a challenge to provide best-in-class care to patients while driving down the costs associated with that care, but SharePoint Server 2007 is helping us do both. Ed Simcox Director of Enterprise Technology Planning, Clarian Health

The IS department, however, lacked a structured way to maintain its hundreds of business policies and procedures, which are employees’ primary sources for figuring out how to interact with or operate within the 270-person IS organization. “People stumbled over where to look for policies and procedures,” says Brian Quick, Director of Quality Assurance for the Clarian Health IS department. “The most expedient method was to call around to other employees to see if they knew if a document even existed, and, if so, where. Even then, determining which was the current version was nearly impossible. What with all the frustration and confusion surrounding policies and procedures, employees were reluctant to deal with revising, updating, and following them.” Clearly, the department needed a structured, intuitive system for more efficiently finding policies and procedures so that the whole Clarian Health workforce could be more productive.

The IS department also had trouble when it came to compliance with internal and external audits. As it experienced tremendous organizational change, and as new regulations increased the importance of standardized practices, Clarian Health sought new ways to run more smoothly. “We had few controls, common formats, templates, or documentation about the creation and review of a particular procedure,” explains Ed Simcox, Director of Enterprise Technology Planning for the Clarian Health IS department. “We needed a formal way to control the management of our policies and procedures so that we could respond to audits with confidence.”

Solution

Clarian Health uses an EMC Documentum system to handle the management of its intranet; however, the IS department chose to establish a Policies and Procedures Management System (PPMS) based on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. Says Quick, “We felt as though a solution based on SharePoint Server 2007 would get the people who create the content more involved in the publishing and management of that content.”

Working with Crowe Chizek, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Clarian Health developed the PPMS, which, as of October 2006, holds 31 policies and approximately 50 procedures that address everything from workstation use and security to encryption to access management. The procedures are integrated with automated workflows to make it easier for employees to create, review, approve, and then distribute them, and to do so within the established authorization structure. When policies and procedures are edited, those responsible for approving changes to them are automatically notified through e-mail, and a task is added to their list. “Crowe helped us understand the technology options that were open to us and played an instrumental role in evaluating our workflows from a business standpoint,” says Quick. “Now that we have the right technology solution in place, we anticipate that our number of formalized, posted procedures will grow rapidly. We have no shortage of processes that should be documented, now that we have a reasonable way to do so.”

Although policies and procedures can be created or edited only by those in the IS department, the entire Clarian Health organization can view the PPMS. “Staff in other departments need to know how to order a computer for a new employee or change someone’s e-mail address, and the PPMS gives them a single place to go to initiate those processes and others,”
says Quick.

Benefits

With its new PPMS system, Clarian Health has boosted IS department productivity, added to its knowledge base, and improved the accuracy of its information with more up-to-date IS policies and procedures. In addition to the ability to create and manage policies and procedures more quickly, staff can find what that they’re looking for more easily and no longer have to rely on coworkers to locate documentation.

• U.S.$145,000 cost savings due to increased efficiency. “Thanks to SharePoint Server 2007, we expect to reduce associated costs by 65 percent while still delivering superior healthcare,” says Simcox. “By decreasing the amount of time that we spend looking for or amending our documents and condensing our review cycles, we’re able to devote our resources to more strategic pursuits that result in better patient care.”
  
  
• 80 percent productivity increase for employee self-service. “Finding the right policy or procedure used to be like a scavenger hunt,” says Simcox. “New employees found it especially difficult to figure out how to obtain the passwords, permissions, and so on that they needed to get started. The PPMS solution cuts out the runaround. It gives employees a gateway to all the IS-related information they need and helps them find it 80 percent more quickly.”
  
  
• 50 percent faster policy and procedure creation. “Now, with our recognizable, repeatable workflows for each procedure, employees can follow an intuitive process that expedites the creation and approval process and makes the most up-to-date procedures available to our workforce in half the time,” says Quick.
  
  
• Improved knowledge management. “SharePoint Server 2007 enables us to capture and track our organizationwide knowledge so that we don’t lose valuable information as people move to different positions or companies,” says Simcox. “Managing our information more completely and accurately also makes the audit process easier on us because we have documented proof of proper document maintenance.”