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Highlights
Reduced incident engagement time from minutes to seconds
Automated the manual triage processes for more efficient and effective incident response
Delivered the most reliable patient experience with better system reliability across mission-critical services
With over 15,000 employees, UK HealthCare is the largest hospital in the state of Kentucky. Dedicated to providing the most advanced and effective care available, UK HealthCare ranked as the best hospital in Kentucky for six years in a row and is one of the top transfer centers in the United States.
Glenn Steketee, Technology Service Analyst at UK HealthCare, along with his team, carried the responsibility of maintaining the policies, processes, and procedures of the IT organization—supporting the physicians and medical staff in providing cutting-edge services and patient-centered care.
Challenges
Health emergencies are rarely anticipated and in the panic of the moment—when seconds matter—notifying the right people is of the utmost importance.
Before xMatters, UK HealthCare relied heavily on pagers and call lists to reach on-call staff. Neither option proved to be effective in a healthcare setting where every second matters. With pagers, there was a limited coverage area, and on several occasions, the recipients wouldn’t get the page, and the service desk wasn’t aware the message hadn’t gone through. With call lists, the process was cumbersome and time-consuming, not an ideal scenario in a high-stress environment. “At the time, we were using a very antiquated way of notifying our IT on-call staff. We would have to call into a service desk, submit a ticket, then the service desk would have to go to SharePoint and pull up a list to find out who the on-call person was for that group,” explained Steketee.
Without xMatters, UK HealthCare risked:
- Slow incident response times due to manual triage processes
- Delays in incident acknowledgment and emergency communication due to limited range with pagers
At the time, we were using a very antiquated way to notify our IT on-call team. We would have to call into a service desk, submit a ticket, then the service desk would have to go to SharePoint and pull up a list to find out who the on-call person was for that group.
Solution
Initially, UK HealthCare used xMatters for traditional alerting to notify doctors and nurses of Code Blue situations. Code Blue alerts indicate that a medical emergency such as a cardiac arrest is happening, and that the patient requires immediate attention. Since xMatters early implementation days, its use cases have grown and evolved to automate several of UK HealthCare’s manual triage processes, resulting in long-lasting and impactful changes. “For our on-call staff, it has reduced their response time on average from four to five minutes down to twenty seconds,” said Steketee.
Leveraging xMatters extensive list of integrations, UK HealthCare has recently implemented the integration with Microsoft Teams. Now, whenever there is an incident that goes to critical status, xMatters will automatically spin up a dedicated Teams channel so resolvers can collaborate with ease and all information related to the incident can be hosted in one place.
For our on-call staff, it has reduced their response time on average from four to five minutes down to twenty seconds.
Benefits
By using xMatters, UK HealthCare has been able to:
- Reduce incident engagement time from minutes to seconds
- Automate the manual triage processes for more efficient and effective incident response
- Deliver the most reliable patient experience