How to deliver patient care with quality and confidence?

Delivering world-class healthcare
As a nationally ranked and regionally recognized healthcare system, Wellstar Health System is an organization that prides itself on providing excellent patient care. Wellstar embodies its vision of ‘delivering world-class healthcare to every person, every time’ throughout its 11 hospitals, 300 medical offices, and numerous imaging and urgent care centers across Georgia.

Gaps in vulnerability remediation
Wellstar has a reputation for excellence with patients and partners, but it recognized a gap in vulnerability remediation. A typical worst-case scenario could severely impact patient care. Driven by the desire to keep patient care as the highest priority, Wellstar worked with ServiceNow Elite Partner, ITS Partners, to implement VRx^™—a vulnerability management system built on the ServiceNow platform.

People, processes, and systems
Recognizing Wellstar’s need to increase maturity and remediate critical vulnerabilities quickly, ITS recommended the implementation on VRx^™, making use of ServiceNow Vulnerability Response to remediate vulnerabilities rapidly and effectively. Two clearly defined roles were set up within Wellstar’s security and IT teams to ensure alignment and execution. Wellstar also redefined its discovery process and rebuilt its CMDB to ensure visibility of systems, servers, and assets. With an accurate CMDB and the functionality of the ServiceNow platform delivered through VRx^™, critical vulnerabilities would now be prioritized, assigned to an owner, and grouped to increase efficiency.

From vulnerability to secure confidence
Wellstar now has clear visibility of both assets and vulnerabilities. Unidentified servers went from 6,000 to 3,000 in the first few weeks, and 99% of server patch windows were identified in just five months. Wading through laborious spreadsheets to provide data to meet compliance is now a challenge of the past. Senior leadership has access to performance analytics through one intuitive dashboard with customized reporting.

Unified vision
With one unified vision and strategy, together with one system and process, Wellstar’s security and IT teams have joined forces to take down vulnerabilities collaboratively. With a clear plan for prioritization, assignment, and grouping, remediation of vulnerabilities is executed efficiently.

With Vulnerability Response, 99.9% of vulnerable groups are being assigned correctly and 92.5% of all vulnerable items are being remediated within the SLA targets. In addition, at the time of writing, 100% of critical vulnerabilities had been effectively remediated. This success story was originally authored by ITS Partners.

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