When your organization’s employees are located in hundreds of locations across the country, serving the IT needs of your users can be especially challenging. Jared Van Doorn, VP, IT Service Desk Operations at Consulate Health Care elaborates on the specific challenges and opportunities his company faces in supporting the IT resources and services. Consulate Health Care has over 200 care centers across 21 states and operates in four different time zones. Jared attributes Consulate’s success to three key tips for support success.
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Maximize Partnerships with Vendors
Consulate relies on trusted vendors and manages relations with them. It’s critical to understand what vendor service agreements cover and what their warranty support entails. Consulate has found it helpful to standardize their PC, laptop and printer warranties to include next-day onsite support for four years after the purchase of the device. They also take advantage of a Certified Factory Image, which enables the vendors to deliver their devices with Consulate’s image loaded on them, saving hours of technician time. This feature is especially helpful for Consulate when they order their devices in bulk.
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Develop the Asset Management Process
Consulate realizes that managing the lifecycle of an asset starts with budgeting and they plan two budgets for hardware assets. The first budget is for hardware refreshing and the second budget is for break and fix. Because of their four-year warranties on end-user hardware, Consulate ends up replacing 25% of their end-user devices each year. The break and fix budget covers devices not covered by the warranty, such as tablets and laptops. The budget for break and fix normally accounts about 20% of the replacement budget and Consulate staggers ordering replacement parts and hardware refresh devices through the year.
Consulate has two dedicated purchasing analysts who only address IT purchasing. They coordinate with vendors for purchase orders, regularly place orders for Consulate’s replacement parts and coordinate with accounting and finance to keep track of all expenses appropriately. They also manage what happens to each device throughout its life.
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Structure Support for the User
The support system for IT can be divided into three groups. The backbone of Consulate’s support team is the service desk, which provides a 24/7 single point of contact for all IT services. The service desk is able to respond to all user submitted tickets and only ends up escalating around 11% of the work to the rest of IT. The hardware support team is the group that handles many of the service desk escalations. They handle hardware issues that cannot be addressed remotely by staging devices for deployment and working closely with the IT purchasing analysts to track and manage inventory. The third support group is dedicated to financial and clinical applications. This group is comprised of experts on electronic medical records, billing and accounting applications. This group handles service desk escalations for these vital applications.
Managing IT services to a geographically dispersed organization provides challenges and opportunities, and fortunately lessons can be learned from the successes of organizations facing similar situations. You can read more about how Consulate Health Care developed three key tips for support success on page 42 of the August 2015 issue of Healthcare Tech Outlook.
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