The stakes of IT are different in health care
For cancer clinics, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies, service management is part of the care delivery chain
During Hurricane Helene in 2024, high winds tore through western North Carolina and knocked out power across an entire region. Within minutes, American Oncology Network's monitoring system flagged five clinic circuits going dark in the Asheville market. The IT team sourced Starlink units, arranged emergency delivery through an existing FedEx contract, and had affected clinics back online with satellite internet within three hours of installation. Patients were receiving cancer treatment before the area had running water.
In most industries, an outage is a bad day. In healthcare, it's a critical event in which drug protocols are delayed, patient records go dark, or equipment doesn't arrive. The organizations getting IT right in this industry have stopped treating service management merely as back-office infrastructure. Here are four companies to watch.
Keeping care consistent even when the power goes out
When a circuit drops at one of AON's cancer clinics, a network operations center is on the phone with the provider within three minutes. "Any outage is really going to be patient-impacting," says William Keeney, AON's VP of IT operations. "As soon as we open the doors, we've got patients coming in, getting infusion treatments." The speed of response comes from architecture: AON pipes alerts from four separate platforms into a single Freshservice triage view, monitored around the clock by an outsourced network operations center. Most of the time, clinicians notice nothing more than a brief interruption. The power outage during Hurricane Helene proved it could hold under real pressure.
Freshservice now runs across seven departments at AON, from HR to compliance, each building its own templates and workflows, without IT involvement. The highest-stakes use case is pharmacy operations, where the platform routes temperature-sensor alerts for drug refrigeration cabinets. A missed notification could mean thousands of dollars in spoiled medication, but now it's automated. Across AON's 140-plus locations, a 40-person IT team supports the entire business, with a single administrator managing Freshservice in less than two hours a week.
Read more: AON scales cancer care across 100 clinics
In most industries, an outage is a bad day. In healthcare, it's a critical event.
Putting clinical staff back on patient care
At NHS Christie, Europe's largest single-site cancer hospital, two full-time employees spent their days triaging an email inbox. Clinicians and staff submitted IT requests with minimal detail (as minimalist, even, as "my printer's broken") and someone had to chase down the rest of the information before a ticket could be logged. At a hospital serving 60,000 patients a year, that's two people absorbed by administrative friction instead of supporting the clinical operation.
Digital operations lead Dan Hollands replaced it with Freshservice specifically because the internal team could own it. Half of Christie's roughly 6,000 monthly tickets now arrive through the self-service portal. The two triage staff have been redeployed. Freddy AI Copilot summarizes incoming tickets and drafts responses, cutting through the vague descriptions that once created delays. "It means our agents get straight to the point, resolve tickets faster, and spend more time on the work that makes a real difference," says Hollands.
Read more: NHS Christie transforms IT operations for staff and clinicians
Treating disease and ITSM with the same precision
Supernus Pharmaceuticals has spent 30 years developing treatments for some of the most complex neurological conditions, from Parkinson's and epilepsy to ADHD. Precision is essential in this work, which made its IT operation a strange contradiction: Incoming requests went untracked, there were no defined response times, no SLAs, and no way to report on performance. Employees stopped using the knowledge base and just walked over to IT instead.
Within four weeks of implementing Freshservice, that changed. Adoption shortly reached 80% and CSAT was 98.8%. "Before Freshservice, we didn't have the processes and automations that we do now," says Alejandro Massuet, IT support services manager. "Today, we are much more efficient in resolving the issues that our end users have." For a company whose entire reputation rests on getting things right, that discipline extends further than the IT queue.
Read more: Employees embrace better ITSM at Supernus Pharmaceuticals
Building the processes compliance requires
Medicinal track-and-trace is the regulatory infrastructure that verifies drugs at every point in the supply chain, from manufacturer to patient. When it fails, pharmacies can't dispense and hospitals can't confirm authenticity. Solidsoft Reply, a U.K.-based MSP, runs that infrastructure for 25 clients across European pharmacy networks and hospital systems, each with its own regulatory requirements, SLAs, and data separation rules. Freshservice's MSP mode gives each client a dedicated portal while keeping operations unified on the back end. "That's essential when you're running a regulated, multi-tenant support environment like ours," says Matt Sargeant, managed service and support manager.
Read more: Solidsoft Reply’s $100,000 annual IT cost savings
