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Eastern Maine Healthcare uses Numara™ FootPrints® to ensure that its physicians, faculty, and their respective clinical information systems are highly available.
Located in Bangor, Maine, Eastern Maine Healthcare (EMH) is one of three designated trauma centers in the state. It has been serving central, Eastern, and Northern Maine for over a century. The central location, a 450-plus bed healthcare facility, is staffed with hundreds of physicians and thousands of healthcare professionals. EMH also has several outreach clinics and 5 affiliated hospitals that are all linked to its central network infrastructure front-line support by Fred Sherwood and his help desk support team, along with a large group of highly skilled technical support professionals. Approximately 100 people make up the IT department; all of whom interact with the help desk using Numara FootPrints. The Challenge With Eastern Maine Healthcare's IT network infrastructure spanning the central site as well as several remote facilities, the task of tracking service and technical requests was quite daunting. Prior to migrating to a web-based service desk system, EMH used Silvon's Help Line project management solution. This "plain vanilla" call center logging and tracking system was used by EMH's 100 agent service desk, responsible for supporting over 3,500 faculty including 300 physicians and specialists. Two years ago, EMH decided to replace their current client/server-based Help Line system with one that offered more flexibility and functionality. The company was also looking to leverage email and the web to augment its inbound, telephone-centric service requests, and improve processes and efficiencies. The Numara FootPrints Solution @ Eastern Maine Healthcare To date, Numara FootPrints is providing EMH with an effective system to deliver internal support to its 3,500 users located at the central facility and other remote facilities. According to Sherwood, his 100 agent service desk accommodates a broad range of IT needs, from applications support to desktop and networking services. They manage approximately 3,000 incoming support requests each month, averaging 160 calls per day - the bulk of which occur Monday through Friday during prime hours, and are critical to the specialized in-house clinical information system from Cerner Corp., used to support a broad range of vital patient care.
"Numara FootPrints was very easy to install," added Sherwood. "We customized Numara FootPrints within a few days and staged the roll-out over two months in order to give the team ample time to grasp the depth and breadth of the system."
With Numara FootPrints, technicians can centrally track requests submitted via email, web, and phone. This central repository serves as the nerve center for technicians and users to track all requests and easily create EMH's knowledge base. This knowledge base currently has more than 180 solutions to frequently asked problems and issues and is key to facilitating online self-service.
"We wanted our users to play a larger role in the help desk process and make the tools available for them to help themselves," says Sherwood. "We have been able to accomplish this by giving users access to Numara FootPrints to resolve their problem on their own before submitting a ticket to the help desk via the web or email." This has improved the efficiency and speed of our technical support, and freed agents to focus on more complex issues and requests."
The Results Since the implementation of Numara FootPrints in March 2002, Numara FootPrints has helped EMH improve the quantity and quality of its service and support operations while saving a great deal of time by improving overall efficiencies. "With Numara FootPrints, our level one resolution percentage has increased from 35 percent to 55 percent, with the built in remote control feature playing a key contributor to this change." EMH now manages call volume more effectively. There has also been a 10-15 percent reduction in call volume since requests are now sent via email and customer web interface. Additionally, the efficiency and speed of technical support at Eastern Maine Healthcare has drastically improved. Numara FootPrints has empowered the faculty to play a larger role in the help desk, allowing them to submit tickets and search for solutions on their own. This accelerates the issue resolution time and frees the IT support staff to concentrate on more complex problems, thereby providing the highest quality service while improving the overall user experience. Users are kept apprised of the issue status and problems are resolved more quickly. All of these features have helped EMH improve the workflow and productivity throughout their extensive network. In many cases, resolution time has significantly decreased. Numara FootPrints has played an integral role in helping Eastern Maine to continue to achieve their core mission of maintaining and improving the health and well-being of the people of Central, Eastern, and Northern Maine, through a well-organized network of local health care providers who together offer high quality, cost effective services to their communities. For the full PDF version of this case study, click here.
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