Where this shows up

Health systems often run EHR, PACS and pharmacy incidents through the same triage process as a broken printer, so clinical-impacting outages wait behind lower-priority tickets while biomedical, network and application teams debate ownership. Clinicians lose confidence in the process and start escalating around it.

How we approach it

• Define clinical-impact severity tiers separate from generic ITIL priority, so an EHR outage during a shift is treated differently from an intranet page being slow.
• Assign a single incident commander role empowered to pull in biomedical, network and application teams simultaneously instead of routing tickets between them sequentially.
• Pre-agree escalation paths and communication cadence with clinical leadership so staff get real-time updates instead of silence.
• Build a lightweight CMDB view linking clinical systems to the infrastructure and devices they depend on, so responders aren’t discovering dependencies mid-incident.

What changes

• Faster, more predictable resolution for clinical-impacting incidents
• Clinical staff kept informed in real time instead of escalating around IT
• Fewer incidents misrouted to the wrong team on first assignment