There is eight staff in the IT department who were inundated with user requests before deploying ALVAO. The requests came at them from several directions and the process of resolving them took an unnecessarily long time. ALVAO has been tailored to the hospital’s needs and at the time of writing the Service Desk has already handled 5500 requests.
Before deploying Service Desk, their IT received requests in a very fragmented way – in person, by phone, by e-mail, or through the Hospital System (NIS), which included a helpdesk tool.
In 2020, a new hospital system won the tender, which did not include a helpdesk function, and the hospital was given the opportunity to implement a professional tool that would far outstrip the previous solution.
Key negotiations took place during the Covid crisis, when the Trutnov district was the most affected and also in lockdown. Here, in one of the busiest hospitals, personal meetings took place by special invitation and the entire implementation had to be done remotely.
“Most of the implementation meetings and negotiations took place online during Covid, and though we’ve never actually met some members of the implementation team face-to-face, we’ve always managed to achieve our desired goals without any problems,” comments Jakub Strnka, Deputy Head of ICT, who participated in the implementation.
Within a month we went live with the fundamental functions of the Service Desk for 700 users – a single point of contact was created and we trained the hospital’s resolution team. The application was put through its paces in test mode and subsequently went into full operation.
Fully functional coverage of all the basics helped the hospital to cope with Covid-19. Personal contact was kept to a minimum, as required during the Covid era. Since then, the Service Desk has been helping the hospital in day-to-day operations.
A single point of contact was created in the Service Desk. Users across the hospital enter their requests – e.g. a malfunctioning monitor, a building issue or fault, a change to documentation – and these, thanks to an automated workflow, reach the right solvers (e.g. the technician who is responsible for repairing monitors, buildings maintenance, or the IT staff tasked with updating documentation).
The solver gets all the background information and can resolve the request without unnecessary further correspondence with the user. The user sees what is happening with their request, what stage it is at, and when it will be resolved.
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In addition to hospital staff reporting technical issues or other IT requests in Service Desk, users can also create requests for colleagues beyond the IT department. If something physically breaks or non-IT services are needed, the employee selects the required category from the Service Desk service catalogue, and fills in a predefined application form.
The request is automatically assigned to, say, the Facilities manager, who will deal with it either personally, assign it to other people, or hire an external worker, for whom s/he will print the relevant info from ALVAO.
Due to the workload of the medical staff, Trutnov Hospital required connecting the Service Desk to their SMS gateway.
An SMS gateway for text messaging is a huge simplification for the hospital’s way of working. Nurses and often even doctors lack a work e-mail via which to get notifications about their requests – so how else could they find out news from the Service Desk…
Nurses from the ARO 1 critical care unit make requests through a shared account. The solver – e.g. staff in the IT department – will receive a notification from the Service Desk about a new request via their e-mail and the request acknowledgement from the solver will be sent as a text via the SMS gateway, without the requester having to visit the ALVAO portal.
SMS texts include replies and news about the request, status changes, approvals, or resolution messages.
HR processes have been added to Service Desk with all the basic functions and an SMS gateway. There were several internal discussions about the functioning of HR and a complete analysis of staff onboarding / leaving and the processes associated with it.
“For each type of non-IT employee (doctors, nurses, etc.), we have created a bespoke workflow that, with each new person joining creates the relevant requests for all employees associated with it – this includes, in addition to requests for IT equipment and system access rights, things like the loan of an access card, the handover of an official authorization seal, etc. Each time a person joins us, the final step of the process is an automated e-mail notifying everyone of their new colleague’s arrival,” comments Jan Fiala, the senior ALVAO consultant in charge of the implementation.
A similar process was also created for staff leaving – to ensure all equipment was returned, all documents were signed, archived, etc.
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We have logged some 5500 requests in the first months of use since implementation. In addition to the IT agenda, the Service Desk also covers Facilities Management, Healthcare equipment, Occupational Health and Safety, Insurance and Human Resources.
“Users in our hospital quickly familiarized themselves with the Service Desk and appreciate its simplicity and friendliness. There have been significantly fewer phone calls and requests made ad-hoc, face to face, in a hurry, in the corridor or dining room. We hope that next year we will be able to implement Asset Management with the same success,” is how Jakub Strnka sums-up the successful implementation.
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