When a major contract nearly doubled NaphCare’s size overnight, hiring faster wasn’t the answer. Automating user provisioning and deprovisioning alone saved the equivalent of a full FTE’s worth of time, freeing skilled technicians to focus on work that actually required human judgment.
Every new hire and departure once triggered a cascade of manual steps across Active Directory, Zoom, Slack, Smartsheet, and more, all done manually by the IT team. Now, deprovisioning is fully automated, and provisioning covers nearly all employee types.
As an early adopter of AI ITSM, NaphCare uses TeamDynamix AI to suggest categorization, routing, and priority on incoming tickets. The faster triage cuts resolution times by as much as 50%. With a dedicated AI manager now in place, the organization is building the infrastructure to scale AI across the entire enterprise.
Industry: Healthcare
Previous System: Kaseya
In 2022, NaphCare won a major contract that nearly doubled the size of the organization overnight. For a company that provides healthcare services inside correctional facilities, an environment where technology friction has direct consequences for care delivery, that kind of rapid growth posed an immediate operational question: how do you scale service delivery when headcount can’t keep pace?
Patrick LaFollette, an IT Service Management (ITSM) practitioner at NaphCare, had a clear answer. The solution wasn’t to hire faster. It was to stop spending time on work that didn’t require a human being in the first place.
“Any friction that we can remove for our technicians and users is useful,” he explained. “If I can save the team time from not having to do things that are trivial or easily repeatable or programmable, then they can take more time learning and helping our users with TechCare.” TechCare is the Electronic Health Record (EHR) software NaphCare provides.
The philosophy of eliminating friction and freeing people to do meaningful work has quickly become the organizing principle behind NaphCare’s ITSM modernization effort.
Since implementing TeamDynamix AI ITSM with automation, NaphCare has embarked on a deliberate, sequenced journey: identify the sharpest business pain, solve it completely, measure the result, and move on to the next problem.
Automation handles processes that are predictable and well-defined. At NaphCare, AI is being brought in to handle something harder: the unstructured, context-dependent judgment calls that happen constantly in a service desk environment, particularly when requests arrive as email.
Unlike tickets created through a structured form, email provides no guarantees about how a request will be phrased, what information it will contain, or which category it belongs in.
Getting triage right and assigning the correct team, priority, and type from the start, has downstream effects on everything from SLA compliance to resolution time.
NaphCare’s using TeamDynamix AI to apply machine intelligence to incoming tickets to suggest categorization, routing, and priority.
“We were early adopters of AI ITSM for technician assistance,” LaFollette explained. “It worked well and helped when it came to figuring out where a ticket is supposed to go. When triage happens faster, ticket resolution can drop by as much as 50%.”
He sees email triage as the area where AI will prove most valuable over time. “I think that’s probably where, in the future, we will find AI most useful. Anything that could make email ticket submissions better is certainly a useful tool.”
The value compounds over time. AI that gets triage right reduces the cognitive load on technicians who would otherwise be sorting through ambiguous requests, accelerates routing, and compresses resolution times.
Until recently, NaphCare’s AI adoption has been largely decentralized, with individuals using AI tools in ways that make sense for their own work.
Approximately six months ago, NaphCare hired a dedicated AI manager whose explicit responsibility is to develop and govern AI strategy across the entire organization.
“We’re going to be moving more towards advanced AI use cases with increased enterprise integration,” LaFollette says. It’s a clear signal of institutional commitment, and it mirrors the deliberate approach NaphCare has taken to automation: build the infrastructure first, then scale from demonstrated success.
As the team realizes more and more value from AI, it starts to compound. As the team starts to focus on knowledge synthesis (surfacing relevant articles and prior resolutions to help technicians respond faster), it will start to have even greater impact.
“Most people who get into the service business like helping people with their problems. They don’t like the process of actually getting into Active Directory and clicking and changing field values.”
For any IT organization managing a growing workforce, user provisioning and deprovisioning are a relentless drain on resources.
Every new hire triggers a cascade of manual steps across Active Directory, Zoom, Slack, Smartsheet, and whatever other platforms the organization runs. Every departure requires the same process in reverse, under time pressure because lingering access is a security liability.
Before ITSM automation, NaphCare’s team was absorbing all of that manually. The scale of the inefficiency, once LaFollette quantified it, was striking.
“We estimated that it was at least a full-time employee’s worth of time, if not more, just for provisioning and deprovisioning users,” he said. “Now, we are automated for all deprovisioning, and that alone is probably a whole full-time employee’s worth of time saved right there.”
Provisioning follows the same path for almost all employee types, with the remaining edge cases on the near-term roadmap. With the time recovered, technicians were freed up to work on tasks that actually required human judgment.
As LaFollette put it, “Anything that we can do to automate service desk tasks helps mitigate that need for increased personnel.”
Automation isn’t just saving time; it’s helping NaphCare retain talented IT employees.
“No one was born to come in and just click a mouse all day,” LaFollette says. “Most people who get into the service business like helping people with their problems. They don’t like the process of actually getting into Active Directory and clicking and changing field values.”
The productivity gains from IT automation raised an obvious question: if a ticketing system and structured workflows make the IT team more effective, why were so many other departments still running their operations out of shared mailboxes?
HR, payroll, benefits, legal, pharmacy, education, and others had no ticketing infrastructure of their own. Work arrived by email, got managed informally, and produced little in the way of data that management could act on.
NaphCare moved to change that. Today, the team has moved service management beyond IT, and more than nine departments are already deployed. The team is doing this without draining IT resources or adding headcount. The key to enterprise-wide adoption was tailoring the solution to each group, LaFollette said.
Rather than asking non-IT departments to learn ITIL terminology or adapt to IT-centric workflows, NaphCare tailored the solution to fit how that department already operated. HR works with “cases.” Legal kept its mailbox.
LaFollette explained, “It gets much simpler for the users, and the end users who are not as tech-savvy, when you use the language they are used to.”
For the legal team, for example, attorneys needed to maintain an abstraction between requestors and the individual handling their matter, as attorney-client privilege required it. They weren’t willing to route communications through an interface, so a custom automation was put into place – all without adding extra work for IT or the use of developers. The platform is agile, and built to conform to how companies want to work, not the other way around.
NaphCare’s ITSM modernization is still in progress. The automation foundation is solid; the AI strategy is being formalized. But the trajectory is clear, and the results to date offer a practical model for other organizations navigating similar pressures.
The most important lesson may be the simplest one: start with what costs the most time, solve it completely, and build from there.
NaphCare didn’t attempt a comprehensive transformation all at once. They automated provisioning and deprovisioning, captured a full FTE’s worth of capacity, and used that credibility to expand.
They extended service management to departments that had never had it before, tailored each implementation to how those teams actually work, and captured data that management could use.
They piloted AI triage, confirmed it added value, and are now building the organizational infrastructure to scale it.
The through-line is consistent: remove the friction that prevents people from doing meaningful work, give teams tools that meet them where they are, and treat technology like automation and AI as a way to do more with the people you have, not a reason to need fewer of them.
