The Netherlands

[Mark Heijnen]

Hi, my name is Mark and I work as an IT manager in healthcare. We are looking into if Jira Servicedesk is a good replacement for our current tool, which we host ourself, Topdesk.

Due strict laws in the Netherlands and Europe, about patient healthcare information I was wandering if there are any Healthcare companies traveling the same path as we would want to do. 

[Mike Rathwell]

Hi @Mark Heijnen ,

I think if you went the route I did, where I host Jira/Jira Service Desk myself, you'd be in the same realm you're in with Topdesk. If you went cloud, maybe not so much. While a casual glance says that JSD will do an admirable job of "like for like" replacement of Topdesk, by delving into the Atlassian ecosystem for your tools expands your capabilities rather beyond the one trick pony of ITSM.

Here, we use Jira, Jira Service Desk, and Confluence for basically All The Things. I have a set of tools readily at hand to support essentially any process that needs operating.

SO.... I highly recommend the JSD route hosted on your own systems. It does tons and once you get comfortable with it, you'll start to see the huge possibilities of going this way.

[Mark Heijnen]

Thanks for your reply. 
The first problem is that I really don’t want the (extra) costs. It is more expensive, but also the basic infrastructure (server, license etc) - which I don’t have at the moment - is heavy on the financial budget.

second, in don’t have the staff to maintain it. 

So the main difference is hosting via Atlassian or some Atlassian-partner. 

there must be more healthcare companies struggling with these issues?

[Mike Rathwell]

I suspect you are right... How many users are you looking to support? If relatively small, it may not be huge costs.

Atlassian Cloud may be too open for you BUT getting a "private and segregated" instance from an Atlassian partner might be the way to go. You're not hosting but you have a validated isolated environment in which your data lives

[David Cowley]

We're hosting internally multiple instances of Jira, Jira Service Desk and Confluence within Healthcare in BC, Canada. We haven't really explored the cloud as an option as it's difficult to get such approvals from our privacy and security people and with our privacy laws it's justified. That said, we're seeing change here with an adoption of ServiceNow (does not currently seem to overlap with the use of Jira/Jira Service Desk) happening in the next couple of months, and some baby steps usage of Azure.

So interested in your journey but unfortunately not much help in guiding it.

[Mark Heijnen]

How do you deal with Jira Servicedesk's history function? 

When healthcare professionals create service requests in Jira (or via e-mail) and they enter sensitive patient information, we want remove that content and replace it with a non-sensitive patient ID. That seems possible, but because of the history function you can still see the original entry.

[Mike Rathwell]

Short answer is... I dunno.

I had a quick look to see if there is anything meaningful in the Atlassian Marketplace and I DID find a couple of anonymizers that were GDPR focused but may not go far enough for the rather more stringent needs of health care.....

[Marc]

Hi @Mark Heijnen ,

I think cloud is not an option, as in NL the health/patient data needs to stay within the Dutch jurisdiction.

On-premise might be an option.  My recommendation would be to have a chat with an Atlassian partner (e.g. Avisi in Arnhem) to explore options and costs.

[DPKJ]

Nice use case. Have you talked with solution partners around you?