The challenge
An integrated health system serving 12 facilities across three states ran HR, IT, and patient services on six different platforms — each with its own login, ticketing model, and reporting silo. Clinicians spent meaningful clinical time chasing badge replacements, on-call scheduling errors, and equipment service tickets across systems that didn’t talk to each other.
The board approved a unification mandate: one platform, one identity, one experience for both employees and patients.
The Mergen approach
We ran a 6-week discovery covering five clinician personas (bedside nurse, ED physician, allied health, on-call surgeon, support staff) and three patient personas (scheduled outpatient, ED walk-in, returning chronic-care). Outputs: a unified service catalog, a federated CoE design across HR/IT/Patient Services, and a 9-month rollout plan in three waves.
Wave 1 — HR Service Delivery (HRSD)
Onboarding, benefits, leave, payroll-error case management. Deployed across 18,000 employees with embedded leaders’ approvals and direct integration to Workday.
Wave 2 — IT Service Management (ITSM)
Incident, problem, change, and service catalog for the technology team supporting clinicians. 87 service-catalog items replacing the legacy email queue.
Wave 3 — Customer Service Management (CSM) for patient services
Inbound contact center modernization — patient inquiries triaged, routed, and resolved across channels with omnichannel history.
The outcomes
- 90% portal adoption for HR services within Q1 of go-live
- 45% reduction in patient wait times at the contact-center triage layer
- NPS lift of +22 points from clinical staff after one year
- Onboarding time compressed from 21 days to 5 days for new hires
- Decommissioned 5 legacy tools, saving an estimated $1.7M annually
Why it worked
We didn’t treat this as three separate platform projects. The CoE design recognized that an HR onboarding workflow that triggers IT badge provisioning and clinical-system access — and that opens patient-facing service tickets when relevant — only works if it shares one data model. We invested heavily in CMDB cleanliness and identity-graph design before the first user story shipped.