Rogers Behavioral Health, in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, was having problems with its help desk software. It was just getting in the way, especially after the provider organization combined its IT unit with its clinical informatics staff.

THE PROBLEM

The software was multiple versions behind, locally hosted and gave users unreliable data. Employees did not know what was happening with their requests, and IT was receiving lots of calls checking on the status of tickets. Tickets had to be manually shuffled, and IT was spending a lot of time managing the help desk system and support requests instead of supporting the clinical operations.

PROPOSAL

Rogers Behavioral Health turned to Samanage, a service management technology vendor. Serving more than 2,300 employees, Rogers' new clinical technology services department unifies a new set of workflows to achieve efficiencies that allow the staff to focus on achieving the best possible patient outcomes, rather than spending cycles on technical requests.

The provider organization used the Samanage Service Platform to build new workflows such as employee on-boarding, IT device requests, and changes to electronic health records systems, unifying these services on a single platform in a critical manner.

MARKETPLACE

There are many service management technology vendors offering technology of varying functionality. These vendors include ASG Software, Atlassian, Axios Systems, BMC Software, CA Technologies, Cherwell Software, IBM, Ivanti, SAP and ServiceNow.

MEETING THE CHALLENGE

"We have a fantastic clinical technology services team responsible for computers, phones, infrastructure and EHR operations – we do it all," said Andrew Neumann, director of information management and technology at Rogers Behavioral Health. "We use Samanage to manage our support tickets, EHR change control process, and assets."

The system is cloud-hosted so it's very fast and stable; and outside of the initial implementation time, staff does not spend time maintaining or configuring, it just works, he added.

"The platform has an incredible user experience; they've clearly spent a lot of time thinking about what's needed 'face-up' day-to-day and what can be neatly tucked into a menu," he said. "Our prior system was loaded with a lot of features we didn't need or use."

Rogers staff heavily leverages the automation functions of the platform. Once they went live with the service portal, nearly 100 percent of requests automatically were routed to the proper person for resolution.

They also were able to tie resolved tickets as documentation in the portal. When they mark an issue as resolved, the resolved issue can automatically be suggested as documentation when someone starts to log a ticket. This empowers all employees to be able to solve or attempt to solve their own problems.

"We don't currently have the platform integrated with other systems," Neumann explained. "We're planning to integrate Samanage and our ERP system to better support asset management and purchasing. They have a pretty robust API and we're looking forward to leveraging that in our next implementation phase."

Rogers Behavioral Health also is rolling out Samanage for Finance and HR support.

Neumann describes one example of the service management platform at work.

"We get a lot of seemingly simple requests that have potentially huge impact," he said. "If a clinical staff member logs a ticket about system slowness, our field services group will do the initial triage. Depending on their findings, they'll escalate it to infrastructure."

Often, one request becomes multiple, and Samanage tracks that. Suddenly the slowness issue becomes, "I have problem X with the EHR."

"Every action is emailed to the requester, and they are completely in the loop for the whole process."

Andrew Neumann, Rogers Behavioral Health

"That request will need to go through our integrated change control process, so that ticket is now 'flagged' for change control," Neumann said. "We don't need two systems to handle 'issues' and 'changes,' and this whole time, the person who logged the ticket gets notifications as to the progress on that request. We can also assign the issue reporter as an approver for the change, to make sure the solution does indeed solve the problem."

Having a complete history of the request (issue, asset and repair history) as well as change process in one spot really breaks down the time it takes for resolution, he added.

"Every action is emailed to the requester, and they are completely in the loop for the whole process," he explained. "Since our initial go-live, we've seen first response time go down considerably, and total time to resolve tickets decrease substantially."

RESULTS

Since implementing the service management platform, Rogers has achieved a 15.5 percent decrease in cost per ticket and a 1.5 percent reduction in monthly labor costs.

"I think leveraging the automation really helped here, especially utilizing SLAs and automatic escalations," Neumann explained. "Keeping the requesters involved in the process has made resolutions much more efficient. We're much better able to handle sudden influxes of issues or an outage than we were prior to Samanage."

The IT team has seen a decrease in ticket volumes, and it is able to resolve tickets faster.

"Everyone on the team also has access to the success metrics and progress in near real time," he said. "Through access to data, I think we've broken down a lot of the typical silos that existed. We've gone from a rushing river to a quiet stream, and our end users are 99.1 percent satisfied with our issue resolutions."

Neumann said they have a little way to go there, but Samanage allows for the software they use to get out of the way of their high-performing team and provides much better transparency during the resolution and change management processes.

"IT typically is a cost center, so any reduction in cost is always good, especially when it comes from efficiency," he said. "Because we're not busy managing our issue tracking system and because Samanage has helped make us more efficient, we're able to better allocate those resources to projects for new technology or optimizations for current technology."

Further, Rogers Behavioral Health has achieved a 48 percent decrease in issue resolution time, a 45 percent decrease in time to first response, and a 17 percent decrease in total time per ticket (from open to resolved). How did they do it?

"It's a combination of factors," Neumann said. "I will say Samanage makes it easy to report on all the data that's collected by the system. Having data is great, but being able to utilize and interpret data also needs to be easy; the Samanage built-in reporting engine is very simple with options to point and click. A raw data export is two clicks away if needed."

The IT team leverages SLAs and automations processing to automatically assign inbound requests to proper team members, which has dramatically decreased response time and makes escalations largely automatic, he added.

"Having a more transparent resolution process has led to better engagement with requesters," he said. "With ITIL being baked into the design of Samanage, it's just easy to do. It's not something you have to think about or learn. We didn't have to do a bunch of training or workshops; it's just built into the system and subsequently we just do it. Efficiency from the ground up."

ADVICE TO OTHERS

"Really boil down the intended use-case or cases and try to match features to needed functionality," Neumann advised. "It's surprising how much unneeded stuff creeps into a use-case. Make sure the roadmaps for the technology align with organizational growth plans."

Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT
Email the writer: bill.siwicki@himssmedia.com