Delivering Expert End User Support: Healthcare Industry Case Study

A Northeast US community hospital committed to providing a best-in-class patient experience with over 2,000 employees, 5,000 annual admissions, and 30,000 annual Emergency Department visits wanted to improve their service desk operations while freeing up scarce internal IT resources.

The Problem

The hospital was experiencing a high volume of calls to its internal service desk. A large percentage of the calls were related to password resets, login errors, printing issues, and specific healthcare applications used within the hospital. Despite being relatively simple, the volume of calls was consuming a great deal of internal staff time, time that could have been spent implementing new systems or improving existing ones. It was also becoming increasingly difficult to hire, train, and retain services desk staff.

The Solution

This client engaged 1Path to provide service desk support for its hospital operations. 1Path provides service desk support to hundreds of clients across multiple industries and we understand the specific challenges healthcare presents given the sensitive nature of patient data. To provide true and comprehensive first-call support, 1Path staffed and trained resources to support the EHR (Electronic Healthcare Record) and various other line-of-business applications used by the hospital on a day-to-day basis.

As we onboarded the client, we took various steps to ensure that the right expectations were set with both parties before going “Live” with support. These steps included:

• Performing an inventory of the environment to be supported, such as number of users, workstations, printers, network setup, and applications.
• Implementing a train-the-trainer approach where the client's HIS (Healthcare Information Systems) team educated the 1Path technical team leaders on specific applications operations and support processes (Ex. access issues and password resets).
• Gathering a list of the top 10-20 typical service desk issues to use as a basis for training and education of 1Path’s service desk staff.
  Creating standard escalation procedures to outline when and where to escalate severe EHR or other line-of-business application issues.
• Creating standard monthly reports that include call volumes across issues resolved and issues escalated to analyze the data and identify opportunities to further reduce reoccurring issues and enhance first-call resolution.

The Results

Since taking over service desk, calls are answered in under 60-seconds regardless of the time of day. And now, 65% of their issues are being solved on these initial calls. As for the remainder, details are collected, and initial troubleshooting is done to set the hospital’s Tier-2 support team up for a quicker resolution. 1Path created a knowledgebase of support tickets to drive improved first-call resolution. It also surveys end-users after each call, measures the quality received, and has maintained an average positive customer response rate of 93% or greater.