Renton, Wash.-based Providence has reduced its IT application portfolio by more than a third, saving “millions” of dollars in the process, a leader told Becker’s.
The 51-hospital system has downsized from over 2,000 applications five years ago to about 1,300 today, aiming for less than 1,000, an industry benchmark for an organization of Providence’s size.
“We started with clinical safety and revenue integrity as our two main points that we want to focus on,” Adar Palis, senior vice president of clinical and revenue cycle applications and technology at Providence, told Becker’s. “No system was retired without a validated replacement or a mitigation plan.”
He said the financial savings over the past 12-18 months have been in the “millions” — including software licensing costs and automating formerly manual processes — but the benefits extend beyond the monetary.
“It’s really translated into faster onboarding, fewer support tickets coming to our team, and a more consistent caregiver experience,” he said. “We want to lower the cognitive burden of our caregivers by eliminating having to have duplicate tools.”
The exact financial return on investment isn’t easy to calculate as minutes don’t always equate to dollars saved, Mr. Palis noted. “We’re working with our clinical and revenue cycle colleagues to find out what they’re able to do now because we freed up their time by not having them in multiple applications or incongruent workflows,” he said. And clinical safety improvements are both immeasurable and invaluable.
Part of the streamlining involves examining what Epic, Providence’s EHR vendor, offers. That platform, as Mr. Palis noted, is already a “very expensive investment” so when Epic offers a tool, it typically leads to not only cost savings but also eliminating a point solution that required opening up a separate application.
Providence also works to have strong governance to ensure IT, clinical and operational leaders are aligned — or, as Mr. Palis put it, to do these changes “with them” rather than “to them.” “The key really was shifting our governance from being something that is a bottleneck to really helping to make it an enabler,” he said.
In addition, the seven-state system is moving to a single login and device per staffer as part of its EasyPass and clinical workstation modernization programs.
“Whether it’s nurse call systems, badging systems, all those different things our nurses lovingly call the ‘utility belt,’ where they have pagers and all these different alerts — how do we standardize that onto one platform and make it as easy as possible, and give one device to our nurses, to our clinicians?” he said.
As other health systems look to application rationalization, Mr. Palis recommended not treating it as “a purely technical, IT-driven decision or a cost-cutting decision.”
“You’ve got to have strong executive sponsorship. You’ve got to have clear guiding principles,” he said. “A lot of folks I’ve seen in the past have treated this as an initiative for one year, and then think they’re done. It’s an ongoing initiative, and that’s where that change management piece comes in.”
