Location
California, United States
Industry
Healthcare
Challenges
- Multiple and fragmented IT help desks
- Cumbersome IT Service Management (ITSM) tool that required constant maintenance
- Inability to prioritize and categorize service requests
About SVMHS
Salinas Valley Memorial Healthcare System (SVMHS) is a California based district healthcare system that covers 15+ multispecialty clinics ranging such as primary care, orthopedics to cardiology for women’s health, and more. The hospital employs over 2000 staff and 300 board-certified physicians dedicated to improving the quality of people’s lives in Salinas Healthcare District and the surrounding region. SVMHS serves more than 600,000 patients every year. In the continuous pursuit of enhancing patients’ lives, SVMHS is undertaking transformation projects from building a robust Epic Ambulatory system to modernizing its IT Service Management (ITSM) tool.
ITSM at Salinas Valley Memorial Healthcare System
The IT support team has 85 agents who offer support services 24*7. SVMHS had previously employed a solution by the BMC Remedy service desk to consolidate the tickets from multiple departments. On average, the IT team received 1,200 tickets every month with issues ranging from hardware requisition, and password reset to the security system and remote access. Patients, medical practitioners, and the staff reached out to the respective helpdesks via emails and phone calls to solve their IT issues. Although the BMC Remedy solution helped the IT team manage the incoming tickets, SVMHS had challenges using it to scale and grow.
The battle with the former ITSM tool
For SVMHS, BMC Remedy’s service desk was cumbersome and failed to take the hospital to its strategic goals of delivering quality service.
The major challenges with the former IT service desk were as follows:
1. Constant maintenance – IT staff invested more time in feeding information and maintaining the tool, with little time left to handle critical medical requests.
2. Inconvenient tool – The hospital’s telecommunication and network teams had a hard time working with the tool, owing to its complexity and lack of mobility to support their mobile workforce. Moreover, the IT team was challenged to optimize the solution in managing service delivery to their clients, both internal and external. Tracking and supporting established SLAs also proved challenging.
The turning point
To embrace digital transformation, Audrey Parks, the CIO of Salinas Valley Memorial Healthcare Systems was on the lookout for a new ITSM solution with the following requirements:
1. User-friendly and mobile IT service desk solution
2. Rapid tool deployment
3. Centralized communication for both external and internal stakeholders
4. Integration with new unified communication and collaboration system
After evaluating different ITSM vendors in the market, Ms. Parker and her team found Freshservice to be the ideal solution for meeting the hospital IT’s needs and expectations.
The implementation
SVMHS took a phased approach to implement the IT service desk. With Freshservice’s support team at every step of the way, the IT team at SVMHS deployed the service desk portal, linked the Healthcare system’s shared email address to it, and automated the task operation process. The implementation was swift, and the end-users of the hospital hit the ground running with zero training.
SVMHS' success with Freshservice
Freshservice empowered the IT team to gain better visibility into service requests with automated workflows. Additionally, the successful incorporation of the Ambulatory Informatics helpdesk into Freshservice resulted in greater support visibility and coordination across IT and Ambulatory Informatics. This integration was particularly important since the unification of the SVMC network with SVMHS in 2019.
Upon seeing the help desk’s success with Freshservice, additional IT groups from Networks & Operations to the IT Systems Security team, deployed Freshservice to accelerate time to value and minimize their operation overheads. Freshservice’s Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) aligned service desk lent versatility and tailored solutions at SVMHS. Freshservice’s usability encouraged end-users to adopt self-service and reduced the reliance on traditional channels of emails and phone calls for submitting requests.
“The management is very excited about Freshservice. IT now works better and delivers excellent results more efficiently” – Audrey Parks, CIO, Salinas Valley Memorial Healthcare System.
Moving forward with Freshservice
Soon, the IT team plans to introduce the phone integration with the service desk portal, as most of their patients and administrative staff prefer the phone channel for service request submission. They also aim to ensure Salinas Valley Memorial Healthcare System continues to deliver world-class patient care through continued optimization and adoption of Freshservice.
“The management is very excited about Freshservice. IT now works better and delivers excellent results more efficiently”
