Today’s electronic health record (EHR) users include employees from almost every hospital department. Providers, nurses, clinical staff, and departments rely on EHRs to help streamline various facets of patient care from at the bedside to patient discharge to follow up care. This expansion of EHR user types has created new IT support needs, and the clinical service desk has emerged as the model that delivers timely resolution of EHR-related issues.
On the FINN Voices podcast, Chris Wickersham, Assistant Vice President, Customer Support, shared several best practices that have helped improve IT support and has earned the CereCore clinical service desk faster first call resolution and positive end user and IT support analyst satisfaction.
Here are several best practices that are foundational to clinical service desk operations:
#1 Anticipate potential impact to patient care.
Before a patient can be admitted to a room, environmental services will prepare the room and an EHR workflow triggers communication to care teams when the room is ready for a patient. This workflow is important for smooth patient transitions, timely care and overall satisfaction for patients, families, and staff. If an IT support issue occurs with an ancillary department user in this type of workflow, the issue can have a downstream impact on patient care.
Wickersham explains how CereCore analyzes the issues called in from ancillary roles and has developed training for analysts so they can support a wide variety of EHR users with context around the impact to patient care.
“It's quite wild to see how impactful a quick resolution on those types of things can have on the overall patient care paradigm. And it goes just beyond environmental services, though, when you start to look at these EHRs. Everything's running through them. Not just from health information management, but billing, professional billing, hospital billing. All those different pieces are working directly out of the EHR these days,” said Wickersham.
#2 Shift left to remove barriers to revenue and more.
Wickersham explained that the clinical service desk has relieved workload from Epic application analysts. Applying the “shift left” principle, tier 1 analysts are trained to handle more complex problems which allows tier 2 analysts the ability to focus more on project work, which opens the door for innovation and professional development.
The “shift-left” approach is the backbone to CereCore’s clinical service desk, and it is possible because analysts hold EHR certifications, have healthcare operations background and have been trained to do much more than troubleshoot issues.
“One of the things that our clinical service desk does so well is we have been able to take on some of the build and provisioning of new [Epic] cash drawers. This is enabling front desk staff to take payments from patients. So, you are seeing a direct impact on the patient care side of the house. But now you are seeing quicker access to be able to impact revenue cycle as it as it relates to utilizing the EHR as well,” said Wickersham.
#3 Achieve IT support scale with issue analysis, training, and tools.
Training for IT support takes place in many ways from cross-training with tier 2 and 3 analysts to EHR certification and a searchable repository of knowledge base articles. This comprehensive EHR training enables clinical IT support analysts to provide a higher level of support.
"We believe that 70% of the issues that are going to be called in as it relates to your clinical service environment or your EHR—those can be handled with that high level of training, basic foundational knowledge of Epic, and key in on the common issues that are out there,” said Wickersham.
By analyzing the IT issues reported, the team has determined the top 50 repeated clinical IT issues also make up approximately 70% of the overall call volume. However, healthcare is fast paced and IT changes constantly so your method for IT support training will need to keep pace, too.
Process training helps tier 1 analysts understand how to appropriately route distinct types of issues, for example which issues require a backend build change versus expertise from change control or security, and the information required by tier 2 analyst to resolve the issue.
Tools and technology platforms like knowledge base, ITSM like ServiceNow, and strong telephony to route callers to the right population of analysts are important.
"In our world, we're using Amazon Connect, which has a very strong IVR, interactive voice response capability, where we can take what the end user's problem is and actually direct that to a specialized agent to make sure that they're getting with the right person at the right time when all things are available,” said Wickersham.
"The way that technology has been moving forward and how support organizations have embraced technology to help bolster its operations, it really unlocks some key opportunities for us to continue to drive continual improvement,” said Wickersham.
Resources
