Executives at New Hanover Regional Medical Center, a three-campus integrated health system in southeastern North Carolina, say new technology has given them real-time visibility into the end-user experience of their clinicians.
New Hanover achieved full ROI in less than 18 months with Compuware's Vantage technology, according to the Wilmington, N.C.-based medical center, and continues to identify and resolve issues before they impact patient care.
"As our hospitals and clinicians became more dependent on EMR technology for patient care, it became crystal clear that we needed a system-wide IT service management program in place that gives legitimate and meaningful data to manage the internal business of IT," said Avery Cloud, senior vice president and CIO at New Hanover. "We needed to know about performance issues before they had a chance to impact clinicians and patient care. So, having visibility into the end-user experience of our clinicians that's supported by historical, real-time and predictive data is critical for us to quickly and proactively resolve IT problems."
New Hanover implemented an ITIL IT service management initiative using Vantage, from Detroit-based Compuware. It also used Compuware Changepoint to provide full visibility into the IT investments of the initiative to manage costs, make better funding decisions and ensure better alignment between IT and the business.
The initiative, branded Project "S," focuses on improving stability, satisfaction and performance of the hospital systems that New Hanover's management and clinical workforce depend on. The IT team advertised and marketed Project "S" throughout the hospitals to gain clinician support and instill confidence back in IT.
"I chose the name Project 'S' because I knew technology language (i.e. IT service management) would not resonate with clinicians, and we had to communicate to the business in terms of results – not methodology," Cloud said.
With Project "S" in place, New Hanover was able to:
* Reduce the number of delays for reviewing diagnostic images by 75 percent;
* Reduce help desk dropped calls by 65 percent;
* Reduce critical problem calls to vendors by 50 percent;
* Improve the availability of mission critical systems by 40 percent;
* Reduce problem calls for clinical systems by 35 percent;
* Improve response time on three primary clinical systems by 15 percent;
* Reduce computer virus infections by 100 percent;
* Improve customer satisfaction of projects delivered by 15 percent.
"Using Compuware Vantage and Changepoint for Project 'S' really gave my IT team a very high level of confidence," Cloud said. "Now we have the knowledge at our fingertips to diagnose IT problems and start solving them immediately."
