Case Study

How RUSH University Medical Center Is Streamlining Network Service Delivery With Itential

Three hospitals. 30+ remote sites. Patient care that can’t wait. RUSH replaced manual workflows with governed orchestration – cutting IP reservations from hours to minutes and laying the foundation for blocking-as-a-service security response.

Challenge

Three hospitals, 30+ remote sites, multi-vendor mix, and patient-critical uptime. Manual workflows were eating after-hours and pulling engineers off strategic work just to keep up.

Solution

Itential gave RUSH multi-domain, multi-vendor orchestration with ServiceNow integration, low-code workflow building, and a centralized platform for the whole environment.

Impact

Hours→minutes for IP reservations. Streamlined service delivery across the entire footprint. Stronger security posture. And the foundation for blocking-as-a-service threat response.

The Challenge

When Manual Workflows Compete With Patient Care

RUSH University Medical Center runs a network spanning three hospitals and over 30 remote sites – a multi-vendor environment supporting everything from patient reservations to monitoring systems. In healthcare, even minor disruptions have outsized consequences. The network team’s mandate is unforgiving: keep uptime, meet security requirements, and never let infrastructure be the reason care slows down.

Manual workflows were making that increasingly hard. Routine maintenance and service requests were consuming the resources that should have been working on strategic initiatives. Compliance across a growing infrastructure was getting harder to enforce by hand. And cyberthreats targeting healthcare were rising faster than the team could respond. Initial automation attempts via scripts didn’t scale – limited programming expertise meant time spent learning instead of operating, and the work didn’t compose. The team needed orchestration, not more scripts.

More scripts wouldn’t scale. More tools would just fragment the stack further. RUSH needed one platform that could operate the whole environment.

Why Itential

Choosing the Foundation, Not Just a Tool

RUSH started with scripts and domain-specific tools. They worked in narrow lanes – not across the multi-vendor, multi-domain reality of a healthcare network spanning hospitals, remote sites, data centers, and cloud. The team needed centralized orchestration with the integrations, governance, and ease-of-use to make automation routine. Itential delivered all three.

Five Criteria, One Platform That Met Them All

After scripts hit their ceiling and domain-specific tools fell short, RUSH evaluated what real orchestration needed to do across three hospitals, 30+ remote sites, and a multi-vendor environment. Five criteria shaped the choice – and pointed at Itential.

Multi-Domain, Multi-Vendor Orchestration

Most platforms are domain-specific or vendor-tied. RUSH’s environment isn’t. Itential delivers true orchestration across data center, SD-WAN, cloud, and the multi-vendor mix in between – the centralized control layer the team needed to operate the whole estate as one.

API-Driven Integration Across the Stack

Open source, API-driven integrations connect Itential to the systems RUSH already runs – including a certified ServiceNow application that brings orchestration directly into the change-control environment. No custom glue code per integration, and no specialist tax to maintain it.

Low-Code Workflow Building

Low-code drag-and-drop workflow building means the team can compose end-to-end services without deep programming expertise. Onboarded scripts, integrated systems, and data transformations combine into reusable workflows – with engineers focused on outcomes, not language fluency.

Compliance & Change Control by Design

Detailed logs, change controls, and policy enforcement at the platform level. Configuration validation and remediation run as part of the workflow, not as a separate audit project. The audit trail healthcare regulators expect, captured automatically as work happens.

A Foundation for Blocking-as-a-Service

RUSH’s roadmap includes “blocking as a service” – automatically neutralizing threats anywhere across the network. Itential’s governed workflows and integration depth are the execution layer that vision needs, and the foundation ready when AI-driven threat response is part of the picture.

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, RUSH University Medical Center

The Solution

Centralized Orchestration Across Hospitals, Sites, & the Hybrid Stack

Itential is in production at RUSH – driving IP reservations, Cisco port activation, VM provisioning, configuration validation, and network change management. The platform unifies what was fragmented and gives the team the orchestration layer their multi-vendor, multi-domain environment needed.

IP Reservations: Hours to Minutes

Hours of manual work for IP reservations across the device estate compress to minutes. The same workflow runs across hospitals and remote sites – reducing wait time for the teams that depend on the network and freeing engineers from the most repetitive piece of their day.

Multi-Domain Workflow Coverage

End-to-end orchestration covers Cisco port activation, VM provisioning, configuration validation and remediation, and network change management. One platform, one set of governance controls, every domain – instead of point tools per task.

ServiceNow as the Front Door

RUSH’s certified Itential ServiceNow application brings orchestration into the change-control environment the team already operates in – supporting compliance processes while delivering infrastructure services efficiently.

Configuration Validation & Remediation

Configuration validation and remediation run continuously as part of orchestrated workflows. Drift gets caught before it becomes an incident, and the audit trail healthcare regulators expect is captured automatically as work happens.

Self-Service for Field Teams

Network services exposed as self-serve products for field engineers and technicians. They repair and provision devices independently – routine work doesn’t escalate, and the core network team focuses on the complex challenges automation can’t do for them.

Governance & Security Built In

Detailed logs, governance, and change controls run on every workflow – the foundation needed for stronger security posture, faster incident response, and the blocking-as-a-service capability on RUSH’s roadmap.

The game-changer for us with Itential is how it abstracts the complexity of automation. In the past, scripting and automation were intimidating because they required you to be a programmer first and a network engineer second. But with Itential, you don’t need to be a developer to create impactful automations. You can take building blocks and create workflows that solve real problems quickly and effectively, without the need for manual intervention.

Uzair Khan

Manager of Network Services, RUSH University Medical Center

The Outcome

What Centralized Orchestration Delivers at RUSH

Streamlined service delivery across the entire footprint, faster incident response, and a network team that finally has time for the work only humans can do.

3

Hospitals Unified

Three hospitals running on the same governed orchestration layer – one set of workflows, one set of standards.

30+

Remote Sites Standardized

Remote sites brought onto the same platform – standardized, governed, and observable across the entire footprint.

Mins

IP Reservation Time

IP reservations across the device estate now complete in minutes instead of hours.

1

Orchestration Layer

Network change management, port activation, VM provisioning, validation – one platform, every domain.

Field

Self-Service Live

Field engineers handle device repair and provisioning independently – no escalation to the core network team.

Built for Patient-Critical Operations

Governed workflows, multi-vendor orchestration, and self-service for field teams – the foundation RUSH is using to streamline today and the execution layer ready for blocking-as-a-service and AI-driven security response tomorrow.