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San Francisco Health Plan supercharged its service management with automation and integration to reduce the drain on IT resources and eliminate toil. With this ‘smart service management,’ the organization has automated onboarding, offboarding and account provisioning.
With a synchronized enterprise, San Francisco Health Plan has reduced silos, consolidated tech stacks and improved cross-departmental collaboration. This has enhanced the healthcare organization’s regulatory compliance with HIPAA thanks to better security and governance over integrations.
By automating time-consuming manual tasks, the organization has significantly reduced the burden on its IT staff, allowing them to focus on more strategic projects. With the right platform, you can streamline IT processes, eliminate inefficiencies and improve cross-departmental collaboration.
Industry: Healthcare
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Like many healthcare organizations, San Francisco Health Plan (SFHP) was facing a growing challenge: it had an increasing demand for its IT services without a corresponding increase in resources.
As a nonprofit organization providing health insurance services and Medi-Cal to more than 186,000 families, SFHP needed to ensure that its IT infrastructure could scale effectively while maintaining high service levels.
By implementing smart service management and focusing on automation using Velentix IT Service Management (ITSM), SFHP drastically improved its IT efficiency, reduced mundane tasks and freed up its IT team to focus on more mission-critical work.
Like many IT departments, SFHP was burdened by repetitive, manual tasks such as password resets, account provisioning and managing permissions across multiple systems. According to Ralph Boethling, Senior Program Manager at SFHP, these tasks not only drained valuable IT resources but also led to significant inconsistencies in service delivery.
“It was a lot of repetitive work that just didn’t add value,” he said. “As a mission-driven organization we constantly are measured by member outcomes so anything that distracts from member outcomes is bad and anything that helps contribute to better outcomes is good, so automating has helped us a lot in that regard.”
For example, the organization’s reliance on manual processes limited its capacity to onboard new hires, sometimes handling only four or five new employees in a day.
In addition, Boethling pointed out that the lack of automation resulted in misaligned user roles, leading to excess permissions and security vulnerabilities. “We had a lot of manual processes and various silos that held us back.”
According to Boethling, his team was likely spending 20 or more hours per week on manual tasks.
“There are three tiers of work – you’re either run, grow or change,” he said. “Running and growing are just doing more of the same. The real value, and the fun stuff, especially for IT is in the change. So the more that you redistribute and automate more of the run and grow tasks, the more time and resources you can dedicate to working on the change.”
In a little under two years, and with the help of Velentix, Boethling said SFHP has made great strides in automating away the toil.
SFHP’s journey began by shifting from its fragmented, siloed IT structure to a more unified, enterprise-level platform, Boethling said. The cornerstone of this transition was adopting Velentix to consolidate and automate critical IT tasks using an enterprise-class solution built on a no-code platform allowing for rapid evolution. San Francisco Health Plan uses Velentix for ITSM, Project Portfolio Management (PPM) and enterprise integration and automation.
One of the key goals was to automate SFHP’s Joiner-Mover-Leaver (JML) processes, which covered the lifecycle of employee onboarding, role changes and offboarding. By integrating Velentix with SFHP’s existing systems, including ADP, Okta and Active Directory, the IT team was able to automate the following processes:
This automation-first approach streamlined multiple systems and reduced the workload on IT staff, allowing them to focus on higher-level tasks that aligned with the organization’s strategic goals.
“As a HIPAA regulated organization we are subject to certain privacy and security rules,” Boethling explained. “We saw we were ending up with a lot of accounts that had dormant permissions. The automations we have now for user accounts and role provisioning address this and take care of the security risks.”
“Velentix’s enterprise integration and automation features were a game changer for us. By having all the workflows and integrations in one place, you have better visibility into what’s happening, it’s easier to govern and really you can then architect it for reuse across the organization.”
“We had a golden opportunity,” Boethling said talking about switching to Velentix from the various point solutions they used prior. “It’s very rare when organizations make a decision to replace a number of systems with an enterprise-type platform.”
For Boethling and his team, it was imperative to resist the internal efforts to make the new platform look and work just like the tools it replaced, “That happens a lot when organizations make a change like this. And there were some challenges for us to keep our eyes focused on the goals and where we wanted to be. We had to challenge ourselves to get out of the comfort zone we had with the old systems.”
And it was that focus on change that led to San Francisco Health Plan’s success.
“Velentix’s enterprise integration and automation features were a game changer for us,” Boethling said. “By having all the workflows and integrations in one place, you have better visibility into what’s happening, it’s easier to govern and really you can then architect it for reuse across the organization.”
SFHP’s transition to smart service management with Velentix delivered significant improvements across the board, including:
Boethling noted that this smart enterprise service management strategy also helped the organization align better with its overall mission, as IT resources were freed up to focus on projects that contributed directly to member outcomes.
“The platform has become an aggregated source of truth for a number of things, so now we can expand our reporting and give our leadership more visibility, expand our service catalogs across departments and more,” he said.
One of the key takeaways from SFHP’s implementation of smart service management was the critical role of automation in modern IT Service Management. By automating time-consuming manual tasks, the organization has significantly reduced the burden on its IT staff, allowing them to focus on more strategic projects. This shift is essential for organizations facing growing demand but limited IT resources.
Moreover, automation enhanced the customer experience. Boethling explained that SFHP’s internal customers noticed improved attentiveness from the IT team. Rather than spending hours on manual, repetitive processes, IT staff could now dedicate more time to resolving complex issues and interacting with internal customers in meaningful ways.
“Other departments have pain too, there are things that don’t work for them,” Boethling said. “If you can help them and partner with them to get to an ‘us against the problem’ mindset then you can make progress.”
San Francisco Health Plan’s journey to optimized and automated service delivery highlights the power of automation to transform IT operations. Through the adoption of Velentix, SFHP was able to streamline its IT processes, eliminate inefficiencies and improve cross-departmental collaboration. The result was not only a more agile IT organization but also a better experience for both employees and the departments they support.
As Boethling explained, with Velentix they are now able to have “People as a Service” throughout the organization.
“We are currently in the process of replacing our care management system and their architect came to me the other day to show how they are extracting data and assigning roles, etc. and I was able to show him we have ‘people as a service’ and he didn’t need to go through these elaborate processes,” he said. “As a result, they were able to drop a handful of features out of development and redeploy that capacity to other things. On a very high-pressure, high-profile project they appreciate getting those wins.”
For IT leaders looking to implement smart service management, SFHP’s experience offers a clear example of how the right tools and strategies can drastically improve service delivery while addressing the growing demand for IT services.
To hear more from San Francisco Health Plan about all the organization is accomplishing with Velentix, check out the recorded webinar below.
Editor’s note: this customer story was written from the content shared in the webinar.
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