Corewell Health's journey to a common platform after merger

Okay, well, good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Hope everyone's having a good morning so far and enjoying the Knowledge '24 Conference. So thank you today for joining. Matt and I are very excited to be sharing really a very exciting success story for how, essentially, the largest healthcare system in the state of Michigan, how they have gone on the ServiceNow platform and really used it as their common, one common portal, one common platform for enterprise workflow, and how it saved them from efficiencies in two mergers in the past three years. So we're very excited to share that story with you today. And I'll just do a quick introduction myself. My name is Anshul Midha. I'm a director within our ServiceNow practice in KPMG. - And I'm Matthew Hantle. I'm the ServiceNow architect for Corewell Health. As Anshul mentioned, we are the largest healthcare organization within Michigan. We are also the largest private employer within the state of Michigan. These pictures are still cracking me up. We had an editor use a third-rate AI tool. Yeah, and we said, "Make us look pretty." And that's what we got. - That's what we got. (both laughing) - Perfect, so maybe, Matt, if you can share with the audience a little bit more detail around your organization and where you are with the platform today. I think it's really amazing, the scale and volume that you guys are today. - Alright, of course. So Corewell Health, again, very large employer. We have over 65,000 employees. We are an integrated healthcare company, which means that we also own an insurance company, which is the second largest health insurance company in the state of Michigan. We have over 1.3 million members. We love to talk about our doctors and our providers. We have over 12,000 doctors and providers that are either employed or affiliated with Corewell Health. We have 21 hospitals throughout the state of Michigan, which having gone through this journey over the last few years, is still kind of a mind-blowing number for a lot of us. And we have over 15,000 nurses across those hospitals, inpatient and outpatient settings and within our medical group. And we have over 5,000 beds within our hospitals. - Perfect. - And so currently within ServiceNow, now, this is a little bit of a busy slide, and there are two reasons for that. One is we've been really busy over the last three years. We've just been kind of nonstop implementation, working with ServiceNow, working with KPMG to implement a lot of what I'm gonna talk about. We leverage one service portal, which is our HR Service Center, and we use Pro. Everything is there: it's kind of a one-stop shop for us. And so we do incidents and HR cases and requests and tasks and knowledge. And we have over 58,000 searches within that environment every month. We also have over 80,000, and this is a number that, as I was kind of putting this slide together kind of blew my mind, is part of the combined organization, but we have 80,000 requested items every month. We have over 42,000 incidents. A lot of those are gonna be automated from monitoring systems and things, so it's not like we have 42,000 problems from individuals every month. I don't want to give you that impression. And then we have 4,000 change requests every month. The vast majority of those are standard changes which allow us to really streamline processes and changes in our organization. And that's been just a huge impact from where we came and now that we're in ServiceNow. Also, within ServiceNow, we have a CMDB. we have over 13 million CIs across 170 classes; 290,000 of those are assets in our asset repository. And we leverage Discovery, SCCM, AirWatch, Vcenter, Jamf Pro, AWS Graph Connector, and the list keeps expanding. And we have a couple of projects in flight to add additional data sources to enrich that data. Speaking of integrating data sources, we have multiple data sources integrated, including Active Directory and SailPoint and Workday, Splunk, Epic; those of you in healthcare know about Epic, but that's our electronic medical record system. We also have ServiceNow-to-ServiceNow integration with one of our third-party support providers. We are integrating CredentialStream, which is our provider credentialing system. And we leverage very heavily Exchange, and an integration with Microsoft Exchange to do a number of things I'm gonna talk about on the bottom. We have 2700 applications in our application portfolio. And you might think that's a lot. We think that's a lot too. But the really cool thing is we merged two giant companies, well, two big companies into a giant company; on the east side, traditionally, the legacy company was Beaumont Health. And on the west side it was Spectrum Health. As you can imagine, we both came to the table with a huge portfolio of applications. Application Portfolio Manager has allowed us and given us a platform where we can actually rationalize that list down to something manageable. And so that process has already begun and it is ongoing. And when we're done, we'll have far less than 2700. We use HR Service Delivery, and we have 23,000, is another stat that kind of blew my mind. 23,000 HR cases per month that are worked through the system. And we onboard over 1700 people through HR onboarding every month. ServiceNow for us, and, you know, we've all heard, several of us have been around ServiceNow for a while; we've heard that ServiceNow is an automation platform, first and foremost. And it also does tickets, right? It also does some of those other things. And we have found that to be absolutely true. And so we developed email distribution list automation within ServiceNow that has allowed us to automate over 300 distribution list by division, by department, by a number of data points within our HR data, which comes from Workday into ServiceNow through that integration I mentioned. And we can essentially, every night, rebuild those distribution lists as changes happen in the organization. We are on track to double that number in the next few months as we bring in our provider distribution list. So we're really looking forward to that. Speaking of distribution lists, we have a lot of them. I'm sure you guys, you know, you go look in Outlook, there's probably a ton in your environment as well. We have over 7,000. And all of them, through our integration and automation, are available in the catalog. And so you don't have to track down the owner of a distribution list and ask them to be added. You can go into ServiceNow and you can order it, and automatically that's fulfilled. Our knowledge base is also pretty big. We've got over 9,000 published articles, 180 new ones every month, and 136,000 views every month. And our catalog, we have 84,000 catalog items. Yeah, and that sometimes blows people's mind. Sometimes we get in arguments with ServiceNow about like, you got a lot of catalog out. Okay, sure. But if you look at that next stat, 90% of those items are entirely automated, meaning they come and go within our catalog based on data sources and changes to data sources. And so no human needs to touch them. They just come and go. And it's ServiceNow automation built into the ServiceNow platform. And so we're pretty proud of that, and the experience that that gives to our end users. And over 55% of all fulfillment is completely automated, meaning no human needs to touch it once somebody places an order and it goes through approval; the person just gets that, whatever it is that that was ordered. And so Anshul, we wanna go to the... - Oh, why don't you tell us about the journey. - Yeah. Absolutely. It's been one fun journey, hasn't it? Right? So what we wanted to share, just very briefly, so five years ago, at that time, Corewell Health was known as Spectrum Health, right? And they were dealing with a legacy platform, really wasn't fit for purpose, had lots of issues, mainly around integrations, right? And I think what you're able to do now with integrations has been leap-fold. So From there, you know, we got the business case for, okay, we wanna change, but it's not just a matter from a process perspective. We wanna focus both from an IT and from an HR perspective and come on a platform where we're focused on end-user experience as well, while simplifying the processes, right, and aligning to leading practice. So you can see here, step 1 in 2019, the organization implemented ServiceNow. We focused on IT first, so IT service management, IT asset management. And then from there, and we took the first qual steps for being aligned to CSDM. And then from there we moved to HR, right, looking at HR case management, hr, knowledge management. And then we hit along the journey our first merger, right? And one of the key takeaways that we have for you all is how, by focusing on IT and HR and getting both of those aligned to leading practices, how that helped the organization when it came time to do the merger. So we're gonna talk about that in the next couple of minutes. But you'll see the first one happened in 2021 with an organization called Lakeland Health. And then we moved to... We did some enhancements. We then focused on our end-user experience. We got HR onboarding in place. And then we had the largest integration with Beaumont Health, right? And that's where, again, all the work that was done to get processes streamlined, aligned to lean practice, that helped Now in terms of harmonizing the two organizations. So let's talk about that a little bit more. Sure. Yep. There we go. So essentially, by being on a mature platform for both IT service management and HR, that allowed us to immediately harmonize the processes. And those processes were now aligned to leading practices. We also were able to realize efficiencies by the automation. So Matt talked a lot about the automation that was in place. We were really only able to do that because we spent the time upfront to get those automations configured, right? - Sure. - And then, I think, Matt, you touched on the application portfolio that was put in place. So when we are looking at the rationalization of the application portfolio, that was only made possible by all the work that was done by getting that data in the CMDB in the first place, right? So I think, just in the interest of time, we'll move to the next slide. Maybe, Matt, you can talk about that all journeys, they always have some challenges that come up. So what were the challenges that we faced? - Well, so yeah, as you alluded to, it wasn't all rainbows and unicorns, right? And we had a great implementation partner. We had a fantastic team. But we ran into some struggles, right? So one was in the HR onboarding space. We realized pretty early on that we had a big challenge with identity. We do a great job of identifying and tracking all of our employees after they become employees. But in the onboarding world, we're really talking about folks that have been hired or in a pre-hire kind of situation. And so we wound up launching with was local login for ServiceNow and local login for Workday, and local login for some other ancillary systems that are needed as part of the onboarding process. And as you can imagine, that was not necessarily a great experience for folks that we're onboarding. And again, over 1700 times a month. And so we have finally come up with a plan for a single identity for new employees, before they become employees, which we can then leverage for single sign-on into Workday and ServiceNow and some of these other systems to basically have a end-to-end streamlined experience. We had and continue to have a disparate process for software distribution. And so we had a pretty mature automated way of delivering software on the west side of our organization. And as we merged our east colleagues in, we didn't necessarily have as mature of processes on the east side. So we are working with the SCCM team and the Active Directory teams to come up with a standard image for the entire organization, includes the single SCCM environment, a single Active Directory environment. And later this year we will roll all of that out with Windows 11 to the whole organization, which will really solve some challenges in getting people the right software as quickly as possible. Tracking data. Unfortunately, last year, one of our third-party vendors that we send data to had a data breach. And it alerted us to the challenge that we don't always know where our data's going and who has it. And so when we do get, you know, in the unfortunate situation where there is a breach, we can't really track like how big the risk is and how big the exposure is. And so we are working with the application portfolio team and the security team. There was some functionality introduced in APM a couple of cycles ago that will allow us to actually track all the interfaces and integrations in ServiceNow. And so ServiceNow stepped up and can solve this problem, which is really a security problem. We started with a spreadsheet with about 150 tabs in it. We're gonna be able to take all that data and put it into ServiceNow and keep it up to date, which is really cool. And then just one final point, we also had a challenge with onboarding users. As I mentioned, we go from the pre-hire state to the hired state with our Workday integration. And a lack of identity for those pre-hires, we sometimes gotten multiple copies of the same person in our CIS user table, which we have worked around. And again, the identity solution I mentioned before will really help solve that problem. - Perfect. Thank you, Matt. - Yeah. - So I think, you know, going back to, you know, what we started at the beginning, that when you undertake a merger, right, and you're on the ServiceNow platform, some things that we wanted to impart on, that, you know, are very important, is the upfront planning that needs to be done, especially from a technology perspective, right? So looking at your entire technology landscape and thinking about what are the integrations and what's the direction forward, the path forward that's gonna be in place, the future state for the source data, right? And then what integrations are gonna be involved. Planning that upfront is very, very important. The second, relating to data, is how are we gonna be consolidating our data sources, right, to make sure, like, what is gonna be our source of truth for users' locations; make sure you spend enough time and really look at, between the two organizations, what's our path forward to merge those together. The third one is harmonization of process and the adoption of processes, right? So that was really key for success when we did the merger, is the approach we took of understanding the two organizations' process, but really onboarding them to the organization that has the leading practice already enabled on the ServiceNow platform. The fourth one, very briefly, is data is always going to be critical. You heard that this whole week, right? And so as you have now a new and a combined organization, everyone's gonna be hungry for data, right, and at all levels. So to think about doing like a role-based reporting, so that from your fulfillers to your executive level, everyone has the level of reporting that they need for the data as soon as day one is there, right? And then lastly, just thinking about how are we gonna migrate data? That's always a complex aspect. So especially when you're thinking about CMDB data that's not gonna be discovered, or knowledge bases, and how are we gonna migrate knowledge articles? Thinking about that is very important. - Exactly. I got it. - How about some key takeaways before we run out of time? - We'll give you three key takeaways. So the first one is all about process, right? So we, I think, have been able to be more successful because we had established good leading-practice processes in place. And we had a process team behind those processes. So not only do we have wonderful technical folks and wonderful analysts on our team, but we have wonderful process experts in ITSM and HR and all different areas. And so as we brought this other big organization in, we were able to explain our processes. And we all agreed to adopt, with some tweaks sometimes, but essentially adopt those processes, and it allowed us to hit the ground running really fast. Number two, don't ever lose sight of user experience. You know, I think that's been a theme all week, and it, you know, continues to be for us as well. So we worked with the folks that were joining our ServiceNow instance to make sure, as we transitioned their services into our catalog, into our backend, that they made sense and they were as efficient as possible for everybody. And then three, select a good partner. I think we've heard a lot, and most of you represent large companies, you can't always do these things alone. And so having the right partner is critical for us. We were fortunate to start a relationship with KPMG many years ago, which has really blossomed into all of the work we've talked about throughout this presentation. And they've been right beside us the whole time, and they're not paying me, I guarantee it. But we've had just some great experiences, and we've learned a lot from them, they've learned from us, and it's just been a wonderful experience. - Thank you so much, and hope you found this insightful. Thank you, everyone. - Have a great day, everybody. (audience applauding)