FREMONT, CA: Change management is vital in healthcare IT departments. However, when focusing on advanced issues, organizations often neglect to lay a robust foundation for IT services. Reliable service management forms the base of IT departments in healthcare organizations. When collaboration plays a crucial role in the effectiveness of organizations, the IT departments have to be quick in resolving user issues to achieve trust and assistance.
The service desks can leverage the latest ticket management systems to track the contacts and resolve the tickets, and also to submit and track inquiries. Incident and problem management form the core of IT service desk operations and help in facilitating seamless health operations. Hence, organizing the critical components of the service desk is vital to ensure the progress of healthcare technology projects.
The effectiveness of healthcare IT departments depends on their ability to deal with everyday incidents. The unavailability of certain applications might even make it challenging for clinical professionals to work effectively with the patients, thus hindering seamless patient care. Even minor issues such as forgotten passwords and application lags might hinder basic operations, leading to downtimes.
Although issues such as password resetting do not often require the intervention of IT personnel, there are other issues which are resolved using the same set of processes. In such cases, organizations can leverage business process automation to automate and streamline the resolutions. The creation of built-in audit trails will enable organizations to mitigate the operational burdens of IT departments and deliver immediate results to the users.
The conventional approach is manual and requires users to wait for the IT personnel to resolve the problem. However, intuitive automation can streamline the changing of tickets and carrying over data. Organizations can also leverage service management solutions based on the processes they want to implement.
Healthcare organizations need to define their processes and business needs when implementing service automation. It will introduce consistency into the change management process, aiding employees when making the necessary infrastructure updates. The consolidation of the workflows enables every user to receive approvals for the testing process. The consistency ensures regulatory compliance and protection of production systems.
The standardization of processes is one of the biggest challenges in healthcare IT, mostly because the preferences of request resolutions often differ from user to user. When trying to accommodate the preferences, organizations can end up wasting resources on customizing their processes for one specific group of requesters.
Hence, organizations should base their new processes on service delivery objectives rather than individual preferences. Organizations can no longer consider the service desks as low-level entry points leading to senior IT posts. They need to employ seasoned, knowledgeable, and experienced personnel on the front line.
The service desk personnel have to be service-oriented and realize the importance of serving at the front lines of healthcare organizations. Also, organizations need to improve the facilities offered and provide better career progression opportunities to attract the best talent. Organizations can optimize their service management processes by employing technicians to conduct formal and informal training sessions with clinicians and office workers, and educating them on the basic troubleshooting techniques.
