Hospital IT departments today are hamstrung by a slew of conflicting demands and requirements like:

• Slow movement due to support analysis paralysis
• Challenges supporting clinicians, physicians, and patients during EMR implementation
• An IT department that is spending most of their time on the implementation, maintenance, and upgrade of applications
• Urgent demands for support are not allowing your staff to focus on the patient facing and customer facing routine day-to day issues
• Lack of strategic direction in IT due to too many right-now needs.

Do any of these issues sound familiar? If they do, there are four areas you should evaluate before you decide to provide in-house EMR Service Desk support. If you’re already using in-house support, you should still perform this evaluationt and assess the implementation of your current Service Desk.

Can You Implement Best Practices?

With the proper thought leadership, tool selection, and service delivery processes you’ll be able to implement ITIL best practices with the appropriate incident manager system selected. Ensure that you can perform optimized incident routing; this will facilitate improved communication between the IT staff, applications teams, and end-users. You should also implement streamlined SLAs, report on KPIs, and institute ITIL framework workflows for incident, problem, change, and release management.

Is Your Solution Customizable?

Customization allows you the opportunity to incorporate your internal processes and workflows into the Service Desk tool. You will need email templates, web forms, business rules, SLAs, knowledge base, and dashboard themes. This enables advantages such as faster request submissions and incident resolutions, streamlined knowledge base, tailored dashboards, and personalized communication with end-users.

Will the Service Desk Integrate Seamlessly?

The Service Desk in any organization must seamlessly interact with and complement other support areas within the hospital. While building internally or selecting your Service Desk provider, ensure that it integrates with applications such as network and application monitoring tools, asset management systems, and portals. This will ensure smooth information flow and reduce communication redundancy.

Are Your Vendors / Partners Credible?

If you choose to outsource, evaluate your vendor’s credibility by checking the company’s reputation, size, and number of years in business. Read analyst reports and position the vendors in the ITSM landscape. Seek feedback about the vendor from organizations that have already used its services. Here, case studies, customer testimonials, and direct customer interactions come in handy.​

Below is a list of the features your chosen outsourcing solution should provide. At Phoenix, these elements are part of our standard level of support.

• Integrated Best-of-Breed support processes and practices
• Rigorous IT processes and SOPs
• Leading VoIP technology
• Queue management to enable calls and emails to be fully tracked and reported
• Technology to record all calls
• Clinical Incident Management and Knowledge base system
• Knowledge management solution and processes
• Operations 24/7 with application monitoring
• Customer satisfaction measurements
• Standard reporting package, Daily, Weekly, and Monthly
• Multi-channel support portal, web, phone, and email
• EHR vendor agnostic
• Patient portal support
• Dedicated Physician support hotline

It’s also important to make financial considerations. To better understand if your internal Service Desk is cost-effective, download our Service Desk Costing Report >>