The particular document transfer requirements of Florida Hospital, a healthcare provider that manages seven hospitals and 14 emergency clinics across the state, led it to adopt a document delivery system from ASG. But it is a project still in development at the organisation, concerning ASG’s configuration management database product metaCMDB, that provides an eye-opening glimpse of the universal applicability of service management.

Bill Gifford, application services leader at the company’s Imaging Information Systems group, is currently conducting a pilot to examine how the CMDB, more typically used to monitor the state of an organisation’s PC and server estate, could be used to monitor patient care systems in real time.

While this might sound like a purely technical exercise, it would, as Gifford explains, help to improve the quality of care. “If you are monitoring the system, in fact you are monitoring the patient care.”

A significant amount of nurses’ time is taken up with visiting patients’ rooms to make sure that patient surveillance systems are working as they are supposed to. Not only does this workload distract from time spent on direct patient care, it also involves a certain degree of risk. There is a possibility that a nurse can miss technical faults, “if she’s having a high maintenance day”, says Gifford. The technology is not yet proven, but the concept is sound. Using configuration management to monitor technology can be extended to monitor technology-driven business processes, which at this point include almost all processes.