Asklepios: iET ITSM deployed to ensure reliable

operation of Asklepios clinics’ IT systems

True to its vision: ‘United for Health’, Asklepios focuses primarily on people and cutting-

edge medicine. It has more than 130 clinics and healthcare institutions which

accommodate more than 26,000 beds, and employs around 44,000 staff who help it post a

total annual turnover of EUR 2.5 billion (2011). Asklepios has evolved over the last 25

years into one of the three largest private hospital and healthcare institution operators in

Germany. This top-class performance is also down to the reliable, sustainable operation of

its entire IT infrastructure. For this reason the hospital operator introduced iET ITSM, which

supports 11 IT service processes.

C A S E S T U D Y

Special requirements of the
healthcare sector
The Asklepios Group’s IT department,

located in Hamburg, deals with three main

areas of activity. It develops and

implements the Group’s IT Strategy. It is

also re spon sible for operating the cluster,

which is the biggest healthcare cluster,

covering six clinics and more than 10,000

em ploy ees. Another of the IT department’s

tasks is to run all centralized systems,

including commercial and clinical

applications, as well as e and Internet.

The Group IT department is supported by

local IT departments in all the regional

healthcare institutions.

The Asklepios data centre is ISO 27001

certified and must also comply with the new

EN 80001 standard. Special requirements

in terms of security and data protection

apply in the healthcare sector, which have

also been defined in this standard. Medical

practice is seeing an ever-growing number

of medical products being integrated into

IT networks; the EN 80001 standard

specifies tasks, responsibilities and

activities so that the risk management of IT

networks involving medical products is safe

and efficient, as well as ensuring data and

system security.

The clinics’ IT components must always

conform to the ongoing system operation in

terms of safety compliance and trouble-free

performance. This involves securely

monitoring the whole IT environ ment.

A monitor must not suddenly fail during an

operation and the transfer of data and

alarms must not be interrupted. This places

stringent require ments on change, release

and configuration management.

Consequently, Asklepios attaches as much

value to the quality management of its IT

system as to treating its patients. All clinics

and institutions are subject to internal

quality management, which is constantly

used to help ensure that the best possible

range of medical services and processes is

provided. The company is working towards

ISO/IEC 20000 certification in the IT sector.

2013 is the date when certifi cation should

be achieved for the service management

system supported by iET ITSM for all 250

services described in the service catalogue.

Challenge:
Transparency and Quality
The Group IT department used to use a

proprietary ticketing tool for incident

management, which ran under Lotus.

Change and problem management was

covered using SharePoint services. The

lack of integration between the two

processes was causing considerable

operational problems.

Process performance could not be

measured and no improvements could be

made. These reasons led the Group IT

department to redefine its processes and to

T h e S o l u T i o n aT a G l a n c e

u Integrated solution for 11 ITSM

processes

u Integration of the SCOM and SCCM

into the CMDB

u Integration of iET CMDB Intelligence

u Applications for licence and quality

management

u Dashboards for displaying the key

data clearly on a daily, weekly and

monthly basis

u Approximately 250 changes and

releases per week

u Around 4,000 incidents and service

requests per month

u Licenses for 70 concurrent users

look for an IT Service Management (ITSM)

solution that could offer them the best support.

Extensive process integration
Asklepios deploys iET ITSM for its entire

IT service management and models the

following 11 processes in an integrated

solution:

Incident Management

The service desk responsible for the whole

of Germany handles approximately 4,000

incidents per month, split roughly between

50% faults and 50% service requests.

Since iET ITSM has been implemented, the

rate for resolving incidents first time has

risen from 40% to 55%, while the number of

unresolved incidents has been reduced by

two thirds.

There is a self-service facility available for

customers to relieve the strain on the

service desk, which they can use to enter

incidents and track their resolution.

Stephan Welz, Head of IT Change

Management in the Asklepios Group IT

department, appreciates the adaptability of

iET ITSM: “We wanted to set up the ‘major

incident’ category in iET ITSM to allow us to

offer even more customer service options.

We managed to implement this ITIL

recom men dation quickly and easily.

If necessary, we can now give an early

warning to poten tially affected users. This is

effective if several users report the same

problem, such as a server service that is

down. Once the fault has been remedied,

all users are automa tically informed again.”

Problem Management and

Known Error Database

Integration with incident management

means that incidents are processed more

quickly and this improves the rate of

resolving them first time.

Change Management

Even bigger releases are controlled by the

Group IT department using change

management where they are created as

projects. Stephan Welz is very excited by

the action management feature in this

process: “The action management function

in iET ITSM is brilliant! All the other tools

that I’m familiar with control the planning,

distribution and execution of individual

tasks via email. In iET ITSM the action

management feature allows you to create in

a simple manner action plans for proces sing

tasks and authorisations. It is much easier

to understand and reduces email traffic

considerably.” Stephan Welz appreciates

the uncomplicated way of using this feature

and the somewhat less “formalized”

approach of the change management

application.

Release & Deployment Management

This application is mainly used for planning

and implementing software distribution.

Service Catalogue Management

The service catalogue is a key component

of the Asklepios service management

system. All 250 services offered by the

Group IT department are clearly presented

in the service catalogue and linked with the

appropriate service level agreements. The

processes are assigned to the services.

The service tree in iET ITSM has been split

into two levels. The top level provides the

business view, while the level below it

provides the IT view to:

u the first level is made up of business

processes in the clinical environment

based on the clinical pathway

u the second level displays the IT products

being offered in the form of services

New services, changes to and the removal

of services are created and processed as

actions in change management. This

ensures that the service catalogue is

always up to date.

Listing all the services in the service

catalogue also makes service reporting to

the customer easier for Asklepios, as well

as the assessment of services in service

level management.

ASKLEPIOS
C A S E S T U D Y

B e n e f i T S f o r a S k l e p i o S

u Transparent process

u Opportunities for measuring and

improving processes

u Optimised documentation and

communication

u 15% rise in the rate for resolving

incidents first time

u Reduction in the number of

unresolved incidents by two thirds

u Achieved a 26% reduction in the

number of incidents exceeding target

service levels.

above:

Asklepios’ service catalogue

holds 250 services

ASKLEPIOS
C A S E S T U D Y

“We’re delighted with iET ITSM.

Our users can use it intuitively

and amendments and extensions

can be implemented quickly and

easily.”

Stephan Welz,

Head of IT Change Management,

Asklepios Group IT department

Service Level Management

A service level agreement (SLA) has been

defined for every customer in iET ITSM and

linked with the supporting services. SLAs

are classified using internal service levels

with bronze, silver and gold status,

depen ding on how critical a service is to a

busi ness. This classification ensures that

the Group IT department provides a high

level of customer satisfaction and the same

quality of services for all customers.

License Management

Asklepios added a license management

application to the standard iET ITSM

solution. All licenses are input in this.

Agreements are scanned and saved as file

attachments. If you click on a PC you can

see all the licenses and agreements

relating to it. This makes the job easier for

the service desk and in configuration

management.

Access Management

General system privileges, user password

management (verification/warning of a

password’s imminent expiry) and privileges

for special applications etc. are managed in

access management. Standardized

requests, such as password reset or

account requests, are treated as service

requests in incident management.

Business Relationship Management

In the Asklepios Group regional managers

are personally responsible for looking after

the 114 clinics and 20 medical centers

across Germany. They make regular visits

to their customers and make a note of

IT-related feedback, requests and criticism.

A record of individual discussions is stored

in iET ITSM for documentation purposes.

Regional managers are kept up to date all

the time about their customers’ incidents

and problems and can discuss these

matters with them. A short satisfaction

survey about iET ITSM is carried out after

every discussion for quality assurance

purposes, which is available for subsequent

evaluation.

Quality Management

Asklepios adheres to the ITIL

recom men dations on continual service

improvement and has developed its own

application for this in iET ITSM.

This is used to gather all improvement

proposals, which are checked, prioritized

and forwarded to the appropriate locations

for implementation four times a year by

management. All measures can be fully

tracked and their success verified.

Configuration Management and CMDB

With the aim of producing a clearer picture

of its IT infrastructure, Asklepios made a

logical separation between its data center

and workstations in the configuration

management database (CMDB). The data

center in Hamburg and all the workstations

in the six Hamburg clinics feature in this,

including the relationships of each

configuration item (CI). On the clinical side,

workstations include not only PCs and

laptops, but also all medical devices, such

as card readers, PCs in operating theaters,

X-ray machines, CT and MR equipment etc.

The CMDB contains around 27,000 CIs.

This includes the 600 servers, data

cabinets and network

components in the data

center, as well as the

6,600 PCs, X-ray viewers,

OP PCs and maintenance

contracts for the clinics.

Microsoft’s System Center

Configuration Manager

(SCCM) was integrated into

the CMDB using the

iET CMDB Intelligence tool.

The SCCM scans the entire

IT infrastructure every day

and stores all the CI data in

its own database. Data that

is relevant to the CMDB,

such as the amount of RAM

and hard disk space and

the OS version, is used to

populate the CI attributes and is written in

the CMDB for this purpose.

The data supplied by the SCCM is

compared every day using iET CMDB

Intelligence with the baseline and checked

manually in the event of discrepancies. If

there are no discrepancies detected, the

data is automatically transferred to the

CMDB.

above:

27,000 Configuration Items

including their relationships in

the CMDB

At the start of the project all 6,600

workstations, including their relationships,

were input manually into the CMDB. The

configuration for each workstation is now

supplied via the SCCM and is transferred to

the CMDB using iET CMDB Intelligence.

The daily scan operations mean that the

data is always completely up to date and is

available for planning changes and re leases

or for handling incidents and pro blems.

Prior to implementing the SCCM and

integrating it into the CMDB, about 20

students were employed as a one-off to

input the workstations’ details manually.

This is an extremely time-consuming task

prone to errors that will no longer be

required in future.

Asklepios is currently working on integrating

Microsoft’s System Center Operations

Manager (SCOM) into iET CMDB

Intelligence. The SCOM is deployed as a

monitoring tool for all the server systems.

The details of all the servers in the

Asklepios Group are being input via the

SCOM and should be saved in the CMDB

as CIs with all the necessary attributes and

relationships identified. As in the case of the

workstations, a daily data synchronisation

process is carried out between the SCOM

and the baseline. This process makes it

easier to recognize unauthorized changes.

Further connections are planned for

network components like CiscoWorks.

a B o u T a S k l e p i o S
The healthcare group Asklepios Kliniken GmbH

is one of the three largest private hospital and

healthcare institution operators in Germany. The

Group pursues a strategy which focuses on high

quality, innovation and sustainable growth. This

has provided the basis for the dynamic

development of Asklepios since it was set up

more than 25 years ago. The Group currently

operates 140 healthcare institutions and employs

more than 44,000 staff. In the 2011 financial year

more than 1.7 million patients were treated in the

institutions of the Asklepios Group.

www.asklepios.com

A B O U T i E T S O LU T I O N S

iET Solutions is a leading global supplier of

service management and software asset

management solutions. The company’s flexible

software suites allow its customers to fulfill

compliance requirements, mitigate audit risks

and realize business value by managing,

automating and continually improving their services.

iET ITSM, the IT Service Management solution,

is designed to support ITIL best practices. iET

Solutions has been awarded with certifications

from the OGC, now part of the Cabinet Office,

the APM Group and the PinkVERIFY™ 3.1

certification for 12 ITIL® processes. Additional

components are available to help businesses

manage their IT infrastructure (CMS/CMDB),

manage licenses and entitlements and analyze

and optimize business processes. More than 600

companies in 26 countries benefit from the iET

Solutions software offerings.

iET Solutions is a division of UNICOM Global,

which operates in every major market worldwide

via US and European subsidiaries and a network

of international business partners. iET Solutions

is now part of Macro 4 Limited in the UK.

L o c a t i o n s

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ASKLEPIOS
C A S E S T U D Y