Bon Secours Finds Efficiencies Across Their Health System with JAMS Job Scheduler

COMPANY BACKGROUND

Bon Secours Health System is Ireland’s largest independent nonprofit hospital group, operating five acute-care hospitals across the country and a nursing home. As one of the largest private healthcare providers in Ireland, they employ 3,000 staff and 450 consultants—treating more than 280,000 patients.

THE CHALLENGES

With so many patients, the IT department plays a critical role in not only keeping back-end processes running smoothly, but also delivering patient-facing services, like appointment reminders, and more. But the Bon Secours IT team wanted to get more visibility and control over such processes. 

THE SOLUTIONS

Centralized Reporting, Monitoring, and Alerting with JAMS

To gain more control over their IT job schedule, Bon Secours turned to Fortra’s JAMS, a leading job scheduling and workload automation solution. Through JAMS, the IT department centralized their schedule under a single console and gained reporting, service management, and monitoring services for more than 400 databases and 30 servers, improving visibility into their environment. 

“We’ve migrated a significant number of our business-critical processes into JAMS,” Mooney says. “It’s saved us a lot of time and headaches trying to discover a problem with a job, because it’s much easier to identify and manage now.” 

With centralized reporting, management, and monitoring, JAMS eliminates the need to look for error messages and email alerts across their ecosystem. Before implementation, the IT team’s biggest pain was relying on the correct process being followed to identify issues. But with the robust alerting capabilities of JAMS and the unique folder structure, the team can investigate issues with more accuracy, greatly reducing the time spent finding and correcting the source of any errors.

THE BENEFITS

Workload Automation Benefits Beyond the IT Department 

While Bon Secours initially chose JAMS to help their IT department, they quickly discovered how useful it could be across the rest of their health system—particularly in patient services. “JAMS has saved our admissions teams massive, massive amounts of time,” Mooney says. “We are conducting appointment management reviews very well in that area across all five hospitals.” 

The health system uses JAMS to power SMS notifications for outpatient appointments, pre-hospitalization surveys, and other reminders and pre-visit form fills. Once a day, JAMS queries a specific database area for appointment information, and using SQL, pulls cell phone information, creates messages, and sends them through APIs to wireless service providers. Automated reminders for the hospital have reduced efforts by 94% for the scheduling staff. 

JAMS proved even more valuable to Bon Secours during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using JAMS workflows, they streamlined the COVID test process for patients by automating the pre-swab questionnaire. JAMS kicked off a database query to look at which patients were coming in for a COVID test appointment and automatically sent the questionnaire through SMS.  

Rather than call each patient, SMS messages with links to registration information were sent to patients with a registered mobile device. Staff could see who had—and hadn’t—completed the information and needed a follow-up contact. “We could look at the gap, when there might be two or three patients out of 40-50 who didn’t fill in their details,” Mooney says. “Rather than having to ring 50 patients, with each call taking a couple of minutes, with the help of JAMS we only had to ring two or three patients, so it made a major impact there.” 

Improving Existing Workflows 

Before JAMS, job dependencies and workflows were defined within executables and run via batch files using scheduling agents. Any changes to these rules required a software developer and a recompile to implement. All the scheduling rules are now captured natively within JAMS and only require a few simple clicks or a drag and drop via the intuitive graphical user interface to update. 

JAMS effectively replaced the functionality the executable was managing and incorporated database queries, software executables, SMS messaging, and APIs into one workflow, orchestrating the entire process for Bon Secours. Now, they use one templated JAMS job that makes calls for dozens of different clinics defined via flexible variables. 

Mooney has found Fortra’s support services especially helpful in enabling Bon Secours to continuously improve their environment with JAMS. “Fortra is quick to respond, helpful, and solves issues. And we benefit from the knowledge they share,” Mooney says. “You don’t get that with a lot of vendors.” 

The future looks bright for the partnership between JAMS and the Bon Secours team. “After a number of years, we still are finding new uses for JAMS that will help us reach our full potential,” Mooney says. “As we continue to learn and grow, JAMS has opened up new opportunities for us to explore.” 

As Bon Secours Health System continues their work providing compassionate care for their patients, they know they have a powerful ally in JAMS. By continuously finding opportunities to optimize their workflows, workload automation helps keep the focus on patients, not processes.