RUSH University Medical Center Streamlines Network Service Delivery & Mitigates Risk with Itential

INDUSTRY

Healthcare: Hospital

GOALS

Minimize Network Downtime
Maintain Compliance & Change Control
Accelerate Network Service Delivery
Orchestrate Network & IT Change Management
Strengthen Security Posture
Reduce Tool Sprawl

USE CASES

Device IP Reservations
Cisco Port Activation
VM Provisioning
Configuration Validation & Remediation
Network Change Management

INTEGRATIONS

Key Results

Streamline service delivery across 3 hospitals and 30+ remote sites.

Reduce IP reservation time from hours to minutes for a variety of devices.

Enhanced security incident response.

Optimized change management and service request fulfillment.

Rising Demands, Limited Resources, & The Inefficiencies of Manual Workflows

In healthcare, even minor network disruptions can have significant consequences, affecting patient care and operations. At RUSH University Medical Center, the stakes are particularly high, with a network infrastructure spanning three hospitals and over 30 remote sites. Managing this complex environment, with its diverse mix of vendors and device types, places immense pressure on the network team to ensure uptime, meet security requirements, and maintain operational efficiency — all while supporting critical functions like patient reservations and monitoring systems.

The team found it increasingly difficult to keep pace with evolving demands, balancing legacy devices, new applications, and remote sites. Struggling to manage a flood of network service requests, they faced delayed projects, frequent after-hours interventions, and mounting inefficiencies.

The team needed to transition from manual workflows to a scalable approach capable of addressing their most pressing obstacles:

Operational Overload: Routine maintenance and service requests consumed valuable resources and disrupted strategic initiatives.
Compliance at Scale: Ensuring every device met rigorous security standards across a growing infrastructure was increasingly unmanageable.
Strengthening Security: Rising cyberthreats targeting healthcare systems demanded a proactive approach to safeguarding the network.

These challenges were not just operational hurdles — they threatened the team’s ability to deliver the secure and reliable network critical to patient care. Automation provided the opportunity to eliminate bottlenecks, streamline processes, and transform how the network team operated.

We’re going to go from focusing on that operational, mundane stuff, to solving complex challenges — because automation will help you do the trivial.

Uzair Khan, Manager of Network Services

Why They Chose Itential to Streamline Network Operations

Initial attempts at automation via scripts proved challenging. With limited programming expertise, they had to invest valuable time learning from scratch, which pulled their focus away from critical network management tasks and slowed overall progress.

Seeking a more scalable and collaborative solution, the team evaluated multiple automation platforms. However, many options fell short — they were either limited to specific domains or tied to individual vendors, forcing compromises on flexibility or requiring additional tools to fill the gaps.

Itential stood apart by delivering more than domain-specific automation — it provided true orchestration. Unlike tools that focused on isolated tasks, Itential’s platform offered the centralized control and seamless integration needed to automate workflows across RUSH’s entire multi-vendor network. This level of orchestration allowed the team to drive efficiency at scale and manage their ecosystem holistically.

With Itential, RUSH found a solution that met their core needs:

Centralized Platform for Network & IT: A single platform capable of building, operating, and maintaining workflows across all domains, including data centers, SD-WAN, and cloud.
Scalability: The ability to extend automation and orchestration across all domains and sites, and run jobs at a higher volume while maintaining detailed logs and enforcing change controls.
Unified Integration: An API-driven model that seamlessly connects third-party systems and applications, eliminating the manual effort required to link scripts with external tools.
Ease of Use: A low-code workflow builder that simplifies the creation of end-to-end network services by combining onboarded scripts, integrated systems, and data transformations.
Open Architecture: Flexible integrations with any IT or network system, enabling teams to use existing tools while expanding capabilities as needed.
ServiceNow Integration: A certified Itential ServiceNow application that enables orchestration through ServiceNow’s environment, supporting RUSH’s change control processes while delivering infrastructure services efficiently.
Self-Service Enablement: The ability to expose network services as self-serve products for internal teams, reducing operational overhead and empowering end users.

What really stood out to me about Itential is not just the automation piece, but the orchestration capabilities. We evaluated a lot of tools that focused on specific areas, like network security or firewall automation, but Itential was different. It brought everything together. We’re able to tie multiple systems into a single workflow, and that’s a big deal for a healthcare system.

Uzair Khan, Manager of Network Services

How RUSH Medical Is Transforming Patient Care with Itential

With Itential’s centralized orchestration capabilities, RUSH University Medical Center’s network team has transformed the way they manage and scale their infrastructure. By automating key processes, they’ve improved the flow of critical data, enhanced the speed of IT operations, ensured network reliability, and strengthened their ability to meet stringent security and compliance requirements — all while enabling better outcomes for their entire organization.

Their automation journey is just beginning, but the team is already seeing significant results and has ambitious goals for the future, including:

Empowering Field Engineers: Providing self-service capabilities so field engineers and technicians can repair and provision devices independently, without requiring manual intervention from the network team.
Automated Threat Mitigation: Delivering “blocking as a service” to automatically neutralize threats identified anywhere across the network.
Operationalizing Automation: Establishing a mature automation practice where building scalable workflows to self-serve infrastructure services becomes standardized and routine.
Ensuring Compliance at Scale: Keeping their infrastructure continuously aligned with regulatory and safety standards.
Streamlining Service Requests: Seamlessly incorporating self-serve infrastructure products into their ServiceNow environment to enhance accessibility and efficiency.

Uzair, Manager of Network Services at RUSH, highlights Itential’s unique ability to provide multi-domain, multi-vendor orchestration as the critical differentiator. For an organization with a complex network environment like RUSH’s, having a centralized platform to unify and streamline operations is essential to achieving their automation goals and driving efficiency at scale.

With Itential, RUSH is building a future-ready network infrastructure that not only supports today’s demands but also positions them to deliver transformative outcomes for years to come.