Hospital service desk reporting and incident tracking are important areas that are often overlooked. If a ticketing system is used, it is usually the case that issues are not accurately tracked. Or, many times, issues do not even make it into the ticketing system, making reporting inaccurate and hard to perform.

The practice of poor data tracking in hospitals is a detrimental one.

A data-driven service desk can increase efficiencies, improve processes and enhance end-users’ productivity. In general it can create a better environment for both IT service providers and the users requiring the assistance of those providers.

Here are the top 3 improvements your healthcare service desk can realize through proper data tracking:

The ability to identify trends opens the door to opportunities for providing additional support to the areas that need it and minimizing problems over time. Since the Service Desk is the initial point of contact for end-users it can identify trends from the contacts they receive. Identifying the volume drivers and recurring issues reveals the types of contacts that require the most attention. With this insight, you can address the issues through training, systems changes and maintenance, implementation of automated solutions, process standardization, or other improvements.

In many cases, issues can be easily addressed by providing the tools users need to help themselves. If there are frequent problems that can be solved by providing education and tools, self-service can be increased. The more empowered users are; the fewer tickets are filed.  Identify the common problems end-users call about and publish knowledge base solutions for those problems to the end-users.

It is important to align customer satisfaction goals with quality monitoring goals. Using an organized incident-tracking process allows your organization to monitor essential performance indicators, such as:

• First Call Resolution Rate
• Average Speed-to-Answer
• Average Time-to-Resolution – Total Calls Received
• Incident Trending Analysis
• End-User Satisfaction
• Service Desk Agent Utilization

Using proper tracking and data analysis will result in your Service Desk continually increasing its value to your organization. With data collection, the Service Desk becomes a major integral component to a more efficient hospital.

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Phoenix Health, a division of Medsphere, has provided industry leading Service Desk outsourcing to hospitals nationwide, and recently was rated #1 hospital IT outsourcer by BlackBook, a major healthcare research organization. If you are considering outsourcing your hospital’s Service Desk, contact us.