The Need

AdventHealth is a large healthcare service company, with approximately 80,000 team members across almost fifty hospitals. As a large healthcare system, the organization has tens of thousands of workstations company wide. They needed a tool to enable them to more efficiently configure and deploy these workstations and eliminate the amount of manual effort required to do so.

Challenges

Front line IT staff need to replace and add computers as part of their regular responsibilities.  Epic’s traditional solution to reassign computers requires IT staff to login to a Linux workstation via SSH (aka Putty - Epic’s Secure Shell tool) and run commands to perform these actions. This is problematic, as this requires the technician to have SSH access to a Linux server to execute these commands manually.

Due to the security implications, technical expertise requirements, and configuration requirements associated with complex healthcare systems, Epic often recommends building a custom web application to allow IT tech staff to perform these actions securely and more efficiently. Without a custom solution, delays will occur because permissions for IT tech staff are limited and will not be granted on a wide scale. This places a bottleneck on the administrators to perform these actions from tickets. This ticketing delay could cause a workstation to be unavailable for days.

Our Solution 

We created a custom Epic web application to streamline business processes and response times for replacing workstations securely. The overall goal of this tool was to empower IT technicians to perform actions in bulk and perform additional tasks individually that would normally require escalation to a different team.

The functionality and features we developed enabled AdventHealth’s new system to do the following:

• Search for workstations in Epic
• Create, edit, delete, copy, and swap workstations 
• Configure workstations from standard templates
• Perform operations in bulk
• Validate legacy records
• Conduct audit log reporting
• Generate reports
• Provide role-based permissions
• API Integration
• Active directory integration

Benefit to AdventHealth

The solution we built is particularly beneficial, as it allowed AdventHealth to swap out old workstations more efficiently and enabled them to update workstations in alignment with a bulk hardware refresh.

A process that used to take the company a full business week and reliance on stakeholders across multiple teams now takes a mere few minutes. The custom Epic web application we built saved AdventHealth thousands of IT staffing hours per year, enabling them to redeploy those IT resources to alternative uses.