Healthcare IT continues to accelerate, and your teams are being pulled in a multitude of directions. With so many competing priorities, it is increasingly difficult to dedicate the time, money, and energy to maintaining everyday systems, let alone advancing your organization's strategic priorities. Daily EHR application support consumes the valuable time of highly skilled, highly paid team members, leaving little time to focus on optimization needs and strategic IT growth initiatives. This will often lead to high employee turnover, further driving up costs. Here are five signs you need a managed services partner:
1. You are experiencing knowledge loss with consultants or your employed staff
If every time a team member or consultant leaves your team you feel like you take five steps backward, you might want to consider a managed service. Consultants are great for short or long-term specialized projects, but even with the best consultant transition, a department will inevitably experience some level of knowledge loss. Employed staff turnover can create an even bigger problem, especially if your internal documentation standards or organization methods could use a tune-up. All of this typically results in the need for reverse process engineering and is costly in terms of wasted time, effort, and errors.
A managed services engagement ensures continuous long-term support through staff redundancy and proven knowledge retention methodologies. Our practices ensure that organizational knowledge is stored and easily transferred between our team and yours. For example, once you onboard managed services to an application, there is no additional onboarding required by your team. We meticulously document and share information to ensure onboarding and documentation burdens become ours, and we partner with you on that knowledge sharing going forward.
2. You aren't sure what your work queue or error queue volumes are or how to reduce them
The sheer number of work queues, overall work queue volumes, and specific interface error queue turnaround times can be an indicator of application maintenance health. There are a number of impactful error queues that contain timely clinical data and will interfere with patient care if not maintained regularly.
We see work queues as an essential part of maintenance in a managed services contract. We have the tools, technology, and experience to employ analyst intervention and automated monitoring to increase quality and reliability while reducing labor costs. Root cause investigation is also an essential piece of work and error queues. No organization should be paying experienced analysts to work redundant tasks that could be reduced through focused time and effort. Our support-focused team has the knowledge and experience to investigate root causes as part of a value-added partnership.
3. One or more of your application teams has a backlog of request tickets
At a high level, a backlog of tickets indicates there was either a large-scale event that put your team behind, or your support team size might not match growing user demand. Other contributing factors could be your submission and triage processes or your assignment and requirement gathering procedures.
Support-focused managed services teams can help with both the actual backlog and assess those processes and procedures that might contribute to extended turnaround times. Our support team can assist in creating recommendations for process and procedure changes that will streamline your ticket paths and result in an overall reduction in throughput, increasing your department's level of satisfaction and ultimately end-user satisfaction.
4. You regularly hear "submitting a ticket" referred to as "the black hole"
Fewer incoming tickets don't always mean fewer problems. It could mean your users have become complacent.
Engaging a managed services team can help re-instill end-user confidence that they are being heard and their requests are being worked.
5. You have a big Go-Live coming up but haven't talked about the ongoing support strategy after
Go-lives are exciting, but how are you going to support the users after Go-Live? Do you need a whole new team of support? Or is it in pockets of areas? How can you keep your operating costs under control?
A managed Epic application support service can assist in both of these areas. Fixed monthly fees provide cost stability combined with staff redundancy. We can scale a team large enough to support a multi-hospital system or add incremental staff to an existing team. We want to help you meet the demands of your users in a cost-effective, reliable way, all while becoming an integrated part of your team.
The strains of maintaining systems after Go-Live were once a forgotten piece of the implementation puzzle. As healthcare has adjusted to its overall digital and technological transformation, the need for managed services has become increasingly prevalent. Partnering with an experienced Managed Services team like Optimum Healthcare IT's can free your internal teams to serve your clinicians and, ultimately, your patients.
