Employee-focused Service Management Drives Smooth Clinical Operations

Samanage is now SolarWinds^® Service Desk.

Simplifying Service Management

The Clinical Technology Services (CTS) department at Rogers serves the information technology needs of more than 2,000 employees across the country. Streamlining services for that many people across hospitals and clinics for a variety of needs is no easy task. When Andrew Neumann assumed the role of Director of IT Management and Technology in 2017, that’s exactly what he needed to do. Patient treatment depends on it. “We were using a product called ManageEngine for tickets,” said Neumann. “We found it to be incredibly cumbersome in terms of configuration for things that should be basic functionality. We couldn’t get accurate reports or create approval processes.” The tickets were mostly either technical problems (like a laptop issue) or some sort of issue within their electronic health record (EHR) system. Those EHR configuration issues needed an extensive change management process to avoid impacting other departments, which they were unable to do with their previous solution. Neumann’s research led him through Gartner Peer Reviews, which brought him to Samanage, the most reviewed and highest rated IT service management solution. “Our sales consult call was fantastic,” recalled Neumann. “We went through the basic functionality in about 90 minutes. It’s so clean, and the UX is fantastic. Some systems try to cram too much functionality face-up, which is really confusing to operate. Samanage has a fantastic balance between upfront functionality and also pieces that are neatly tucked away to prevent clutter.” He immediately started to build workflows for those aforementioned services. The other immediate benefit was the ability to incorporate IT asset management directly into the CTS service desk. “Some help desk systems don’t have asset management at all, or it’s some integration with another provider.” said Neumann. “Samanage is nice and easy, and it’s all in one place. We can tie assets to people and locations, plus we have the entire service history on each one. That helps us track trends and it helps us with change management.”

Building a Service Catalog

Rogers Behavioral Health has also planned to automate workflows and approval processes through the service catalog. They’re starting in CTS, building forms to request new devices and technology. “We have Samanage forms for new employees, new computers, badges, and cell phones,” said Neumann. “We’ve also built in approval processes if someone wants an upgrade, a new phone, or has other needs. Employee requests seem to be going a lot better.” Neumann also said that they’re exploring building vehicle request forms since Rogers Behavioral Health has a large vehicle pool for transporting patients to different activities. Not only that, but there are plans to run services from Finance and other departments through Samanage as well. “We have a lot of departments running off distribution lists, and those processes don’t scale,” explained Neumann. “Some service desk solutions don’t work well for other departments, but Samanage makes it really easy. We’re going to see all kinds of efficiencies come out of this.”

Service Desk ROI

Though it hasn’t been long since Rogers Behavioral Health switched to Samanage, they’ve already seen numerous benefits. First, Neumann says they already built 110 Service Level Agreements (SLAs) unique to different sites and departments. These SLAs help escalate tickets up the chain to ensure timely service delivery. “We have instant transparency, which is fantastic,” said Neumann. “I don’t have to run a report; I just get an email. We also have a separate plan for after hours, where it will send a text to the on call rotation for critical issues when our staff is low.” In addition to the SLAs and escalation protocols, Neumann’s team has been able take advantage of new dashboards and reporting. “We have more up-to-date metrics with real time reporting,” said Neumann. “Everyone has access to the dashboards, so all of our service agents can see everyone else’s open-closed ratios, adding to the motivation.” He adds that employee response rate on satisfaction surveys has increased from about 5 percent all the way up to 25 percent. His team is also seeing tangible ROI in terms of their actual service delivery efficiency. With the help of automations, issue resolution time has decreased 48 percent and time to first response is down 45 percent. Finally, one more pleasant surprise upon implementing Samanage: “We found 400 computers that we didn’t know we had,” said Neumann. “We’re right in the middle of a massive equipment refresh, so that’s great to know what we have and to where it is. The reporting on software installations and warranty statuses will be very important with this new investment.” Measurable benefits aside, the overarching goal is to improve the ability for clinical team members other employees to get what they need, when they need it. Neumann and his team have been able to connect their employees to resources very quickly and easily. “We don’t want to spend our time and energy configuring the help desk,” said Neumann. “We want the help desk to just work. We want to focus as much time as possible on making clinical operations smoother so it’s easy for our employees to provide better treatment to our patients.”