Executive Summary
Patient population and staff growth outpaced regional healthcare services provider, Baton Rouge General Health Systems‘ IT resource capacity leading to low employee
satisfaction scores.
BRG’s partnership with Sparkhound integrated the two service desk teams in a co-managed, 24x7x365 Service Desk
with great success. Quicker ticket response and meaningful resolution has increased employee satisfaction scores,
freed up critical IT staff for more strategic initiatives, and improved service desk KPIs across the board.
CHALLENGE
Regional healthcare provider, Baton Rouge General Health Systems consists of three main campuses and an extensive network of physician offices across the capital city metro.
Growing patient population and staff caused service desk ticket volume to reach untenable levels.
This impacted BRG’s ability to not only deliver new mission critical technology initiatives, their patient care personnel satisfaction (aka customer satisfaction) level was low.
Patient care professionals were not receiving the help and support they needed in a timely and efficient manner.
SOLUTION
Baton Rouge General Health Systems leverages Sparkhound’s 24x7x365 in-house, on-shore Tier 1 Service Desk team to partner with their service desk for a co-managed
solution to resolve basic user issues. This allowed for BRG system engineers to focus on business initiatives and project work instead of service desk tickets.
A single point of entry for all physician, nurse, and administration requests is the foundation for an ITIL-based escalation path from Tier 1 technicians all the way to
Tier 4 experts. Documentation from initial requests and escalation points continue to prove invaluable during problem determination and resolution. The integrated solution
allows for consistent communications and knowledge transfer between teams for Knowledge Base updates, driving expedited ticket resolution and accountability. Sparkhound has
decreased total call volume through user education and metric analysis with management team.
The solution comprises of the following technologies:
Features leading the solution's success:
-
During implementation, Sparkhound helped develop an efficient method for contacting IT resources via pagers in the event of Critical Priority 1 and Severe
Priority 2 instances during high call volumes within SLA guidelines.
-
To further bolster speed and effectiveness, Sparkhound teamed with the BRG information security team for their companywide Knowledge Base upgrade. This effort
led the way to update the entire Baton Rouge General Technical Knowledge Base, which expedited service delivery to employees resulting in increased employee
satisfaction.
-
Ensuring service uptime, disaster recovery redundancy has been integrated through support team placement at multiple geographic locations.
-
Sparkhound provides onsite support during companywide application upgrades that could affect all employees. This hands-on approach shows dedication and commitment to
Sparkhound’s ‘one-team’ initiative with BRG.
IMPACT
Application and infrastructure engineers with specialized skillsets are now better utilized. Their new-found freedom from handling first tier support and basic user requests
has enabled them to concentrate on larger project-based, business initiatives.
Operational metrics including incident, request, and problem classification leads us to root-cause resolution rather than simply closing a high number of the same type
of tickets. Additional milestones include:
-
Average speed to answer, processing time, and abandonment rate provided accountability and benchmarks and helped inform what defines success.
-
Response KPIs for critical and severe tickets ensured appropriate resources were contacted within proper time frames for expedited resolution.
-
Ticket volume during and outside peak hours provides a return of roughly 6-8 resources when including ticket processing time and team management.
-
Regular management meetings to review key metrics and refine standard operating procedures garnered increased employee satisfaction and perception of the IT
department.
