The client is a mid-sized, multi-speciality healthcare provider. They operated across multiple US states. With a growing network of hospitals, clinics, and telehealth services, they deliver integrated care in inpatient, outpatient, and virtual settings.
Their workforce, comprising physicians, nurses, administrative staff and IT teams, supports a diverse and expanding patient base. Considering they were operating in a heavily regulated sector, they were expected to keep their clinical operations aligned with industry standards like HIPAA, NIST 800-53, and state-specific mandates. Their leadership wanted to modernize the internal systems and improve service delivery.
Reasons for Collaboration
As they were expanding their regional presence, their internal governance, risk, and compliance functions started showing fallouts. Risk assessments were decentralized and inconsistent, and policy management was handled through informal channels. Audit preparations needed extensive and manual coordination across departments.
These inefficiencies increased regulatory exposure and created an undue burden on teams that were focused on delivering high-quality patient care. To overcome these challenges, they partnered with Cyntexa, a ServiceNow Consulting & Implementation partner. The main objective for this collaboration was to establish a centralized, auditable, and scalable GRC framework without disrupting ongoing clinical and operational workflows.
Challenges
- Outdated Policy Lifecycle Management: One of the core challenges was the outdated policy lifecycle process. Policies were created, shared and updated using shared drives, email chains, and static documents. There was no version control or approval visibility, which led to delays, outdated references, and undefined accountability for compliance management.
Staff across the organization often accessed incorrect or expired versions of policies, creating risk not just in regulatory terms, but in operational processes and patient safety.
- No Unified View of Organizational Risk: Risk assessment processes were scattered across different departments, including IT, legal, medical and finance. Each team had different templates, formats and scoring models. Without a shared framework or centralized system, managers were unable to get a clear picture of potential risks posture.
- Disconnected Regulatory Mapping Across Policies and Controls: Their teams were tracking compliance with regulations like HIPAA and NIST using disconnected spreadsheets. Without structured regulatory mapping, they couldn’t connect internal policies and controls to external requirements. This made audit preparation reactive and compliance documentation unreliable.
- Inefficient Audit Preparation and Execution: The audit execution process was severely tempered by manual evidence collection. Supporting documents like personal folders, inboxes, and legacy tools were organized. Without a standardized process for evidence tracking and remediation, audit cycles became inefficient, and findings were often left unaddressed or unassigned.
Solutions
We implemented a scalable IRM solution on the ServiceNow Platform that addresses the needs of the client in terms of operating environment, workforce roles and compliance obligations.
- Automated Policy Management with Tracking and Acknowledgements: We deployed the ServiceNow Policy and Compliance Management module to modernise policy governance. All policies were centralized in a secure, role-based portal. We also configured a formal approval workflow that can move each document through structured stages, drafting, review, legal validation, risk alignment and executive sign-off.
Version control and automated notification functionality ensured the employees received the latest version of policies for acknowledgement always. A built-in exception management flow enabled teams to request and track policy deviations in regulated areas, closing a critical compliance gap. - Centralized Risk Register via ServiceNow IRM: Our ServiceNow experts established a unified risk register within the ServiceNow Risk Management module to address the fragmented risk situation. Each department was aligned under a consistent risk taxonomy with standardized scoring criteria and likelihood/impact models defined by the ISO 31000 framework.
We also enabled real-time dashboards to allow leadership to monitor evolving risk trends across functions, and to drill into risk treatment plans, ownership, and response progress, all from a single interface. - Unified Regulatory Mapping via Authority Documents: Our experts configured ServiceNow Authority Documents and Control objectives for regulatory mapping and linking internal policies and controls to external regulatory frameworks. This gets the traceability from HIPAA and NIST requirements down to the specific policies and controls enforcing them. The configuration also enabled real-time compliance reporting and simplified audit traceability, moving the client away from the spreadsheet-based compliance tracking.
- Streamlined Audit Management Process: The overwhelm caused by audit operations was addressed with the implementation of ServiceNow’s Audit Management module. From planning to reporting, the audit lifecycle has been automated and improved. We integrated evidence collection directly into audit tasks and remediation workflows that ensured the findings were assigned, tracked and resolved with full accountability. Internal and external auditors gained access to real-time dashboards showing the status of fieldwork, open findings and historical patterns.
Benefits
- A single, consolidated view of organizational risks helped leadership act faster and more strategically.
- Audit prep went from weeks to days, with automated evidence collection and fewer back-and-forths.
- Policy management became easier, cleaner, and fully trackable, with version control built in.
- Exception handling became more transparent, structured, and accountable.
