Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on how a healthcare app provider has improved its process and policies using HP Service Anywhere.

1. SaaS Healthcare Apps Provider PointClickCare Masters
Quality and DevOps Using HP Service Anywhere
Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on how a healthcare app provider has
improved its process and policies using HP Service Anywhere.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: HP
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I’m
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this
ongoing sponsored discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.
Once again, we’re focusing on how companies are adapting to the new style of
IT to improve IT performance and deliver better user experiences, and business
results. This time, we’re coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2013
Conference in Barcelona.
We’re here the week of December 9 to learn directly from IT and business
leaders alike how big data, mobile, and cloud, along with converged
infrastructure are all supporting their goals.
Our next innovation case study highlights how PointClickCare is improving its operations and
managing a significant growth in the healthcare industry. To learn more about how they're doing
it, please join me in welcoming Craig Schultz, Director of Hosting Operations at PointClickCare
in Toronto. Welcome, Craig.
Craig Schultz: Thank you very much.
Gardner: Tell us a little bit about what's going on in your business. We know that healthcare is a
very dynamic environment, and there is a lot going on in moving organizations
to electronic health records (EHRs). How is this affecting your business.
Schultz: We’re very busy, adding customers all of the time, trying to keep up
with the demand for data, installing new customers, training customers,
deploying new platforms on our end, infrastructure changes, and of course,
rolling out Service Anywhere.
Gardner: And because your application is delivered through multi-tenancy, software as a service
(SaaS), and cloud to all these healthcare organizations, software is more than a core competency.
It practically defines your business.
Gardner

2. Schultz: Exactly. As a SaaS provider, we need to always be up. Up-time is our biggest focus that
we have. The other part is release management. How do we keep updating our software, staying
competitive, being agile along with our developers, and constantly improving ourselves?
Gardner: And you're no johnny-come-lately to the cloud. You’ve been doing SaaS for quite
some time.
Schultz: Yes, for approximately 10 years. We were one of the original ones to kick it off in our
market space. From that, we've grown it, and now, it's scalable. We're now in multiple countries
and we're looking at how to continue to grow and keep the SaaS model and multi-tenancy as
efficient as possible.
Mobile revolution
Gardner: Craig, how about the mobile revolution? How is that impacting your business? Does
it matter whether they’re using a tablet to access your services or other devices or PCs? How is
the device end of things affecting you?
Schultz: Good question. We're fully cross-browser. From a platform standpoint, it doesn't matter.
We’re actually releasing our Point of Care and related software on the Apple iPad and iPhone.
From that standpoint, we’re looking at it as if they have a dedicated tablet that
they could use in their environment or they have one of the PCs or related items.
Gardner: I have to assume, Craig, that this is a mission-critical application for
these healthcare organizations. They’re administrating medications, tracking
billing, tracking what takes place through a process along a medical trajectory,
all very much in real time, very mission-critical.
Schultz: Absolutely. This is a 24×7 service that’s used all the time. As you say,
with medication management we do a closed loop with the pharmacies for ordering. Obviously,
safety is the biggest priority for our customers and for us. So on the SaaS service, we need to
make sure that all the tools are current. We have our monitoring and our stats. Then, obviously, if
there are any issues, incident management is one of the key areas.
Gardner: Tell me how you do operations and development. I believe that with software being so
critical, when you do fast iterations for a multi-tenancy environment, DevOps is a priority, but
with development and operations, there’s no daylight between them.
Schultz: Exactly. Our development team runs by agile, as a lot of places do. At PointClickCare,
we’re looking at a weekly release schedule in general. That means constant change and constant
releases. DevOps is a priority. We need to make sure that the QA people have their servers. Then,
it goes to production, and there aren't any problems when we release it. We make sure that that’s
a defined process, scripted, and then tied into our tools.
Schultz

3. Gardner: Given that you’re the Director of Hosting Operations, what do you need in terms of
other outside help to get this done? What were the challenges and requirements you had and then
how did you fulfill them?
Schultz: What we wanted to solve at this point was to improve our processes, our definitions,
and our policies on how we deploy our software and make sure that they’re set on standards. We
were looking at an ITSM tool that would bring that framework to us to help us mature and take
us to that next level, as we look at how much change and growth we're going through.
Gardner: How long have you been using HP Service Anywhere?
Schultz: We have been using Service Anywhere for three months. At this time, we’ve rolled it
out into the whole hosting operations team. We use it for tracking all of our change management,
incident management, problem management, then related key performance indicators (KPIs).
Gardner: How did you do it before?
Case system
Schultz: We used a case system. It wasn’t defined as a ticketing system, and it was very hard to
track information. What made it harder was the lack of searchability within there to find that
information. How do you do reporting? How do you really look at the statistics? So we launched
this new tool, and that’s taking care of all that.
Gardner: This sounds a bit like changing the wings on an airplane while still flying. Did you
find the transition difficult? What was most difficult about it?
Schultz: The transition was made simpler by engaging HP services. We used them extensively
for our training. We did the ITIL training ahead of time with our staff. We used HP services to
come in and walk us through this. They’re the experts on the tool.
Probably the biggest difficulty was, as you say, getting the resources to the people that were
dedicated to this project while running full speed ahead. There was no delay.
Gardner: I know it's a little early in the roll out, but have there been any indicators of how it's
functioning and any metrics of success or return-on-investment (ROI) types of inputs?
Schultz: Our biggest results right now is that 100 percent of changes are tracked in the system.
They’re following our change-management process. We can go through, review them, monitor
them, look at the results of the changes, and actually get end-to-end process development going
through that.
We actually have that closed loop on change and incident management. We’re now tracking all
incidents that we weren't before. Because of the system, you can look for them after. So you can

4. build any trajectory or problem management. When you look at the suite of change incidents and
problems, we have that full loop in our operations.
From a measurement standpoint, that has reduced the amount of time that it takes for us to
actually implement a change. If we’re asked to create a database, create new customers,
whatever it might be, we can turn that around a lot faster because there aren't delays in the
system.
Gardner: Any thoughts, once you get further into HP Service Anywhere, as to what you'll be
integrating this into other activities, further back into the development phase, perhaps associated
with code management? Where do you go next?
Schultz: Where we go next is around the new versions and new software. As we bring on the
new versions of the software and Service Anywhere, we’re going to implement the new tools. So
when we look at the self-service portal, how do we roll that out to the users to be able to connect,
create their own requests or, even better, solve their own problems. That will reduce a lot of the
load runner IT team and lot of those tickets that we are getting from that.
Looking at some of the integration points, that’s going to be how we automate our changes, our
software, and our incidents in the future. That’s going to all tie in the Service Anywhere. As well,
we’re looking at rolling it out across the company. That way, everybody uses a centralized tool. It
has all the functionality that you need. Develop the KPIs, and run by the numbers and metrics.
Gardner: No more guess work.
Schultz: Exactly.
Gardner: I’m afraid we'll have to leave it there. We’ve been talking about how PointClickCare
is advancing its operations in IT using HP Service Anywhere. Please join me now in thanking
our guest Craig Schultz, Director of Hosting Operations at PointClickCare in Toronto. Thanks so
much, Craig.
Schultz: Thank you very much for having me.
Gardner: And thank you also to our audience for joining us for this special new style of IT
discussion coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2013 Conference in Barcelona.
I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of
HP sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: HP
Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on how a healthcare app provider has
improved its process and policies using HP Service Anywhere. Copyright Interarbor Solutions,
LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.

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