New Customer Experiences Immediate Positive Impact after Implementing Persystent Suite
| Industry: |
Healthcare |
 |
| Number of PCs: |
240 |
| IT Challenge: |
Managing Day to Day Help Desk Requests |
| Solution: |
Persystent Suite |
Q&A Case Study Interview with Jared Alfson, Information Services Manager
Was there a compelling event that drove you to search for a product like Persystent?
“We were struggling to keep up with day to day help desk requests. Our small IS staff time was being hoarded by basic help desk calls. We felt like we were always plagued with reacting to day to day issues. We reached a point where we were falling behind and needed a way to catch up and keep up. Therefore, our main goal was to reduce the overall help desk volume. Since we couldn’t add staff, we needed better tools to help us work more efficiently. That’s when we saw the demo of Persystent.”
How many people are in your IT department?
“We have six total active in our day to day IT operations. With 360 employees and 240 desktops throughout all locations, we spend the majority of our time supporting the infrastructure. We have six clinics offsite throughout the county. We have a specialist dedicated to key areas including the network, applications/enterprise, clinical IS, technical support and database programming. We take turns covering the help desk with two people all day.”
How are you using Persystent in your environment?
“Right now, Tech Support sets up PC replacements and deploys computers. After that, if there is a call to the help desk, we simply tell end users to “just reboot” and the problem goes away.
We have a cycle in deploying PCs. Since we want to keep performance up, we have adopted a 3 year replacement plan. If we fall behind on the 3 year plan, we have people waiting on computers or using computers that are slow and sluggish therefore we lose productivity as an organization. However, like a lot of IT departments, we are behind on that now. Four to five years is more realistic. Persystent helps to extend the life of the 3 year PCs.”
Could you describe the highlights of your implementation of Persystent into your environment?
“Before Persystent, it took 4-5 hours to deploy a new PC and we had to babysit the process. With Persystent Suite, provisioning takes just under 2 hours. We just set it up and let it go.
Also, before Persystent, if we had to recover a down PC, the norm was to replace it or the hard drive but that meant restoring it back to its out of the box state on day one. With Persystent, we can restore back to like it was running like yesterday and all the user profiles and settings are still there. They don’t have to be changed.
We are currently in the middle of deployment of the Persystent Suite client to existing PCs so that repair is automated across organization. With some older PCs we might need to go to them individually but we anticipate widespread deployment in the near future.
Could you describe a day in your life as an IT Administrator?
“Unlike other businesses, in most cases, if a PC issue is related to work flow, it will impact patient care. I’ll give you a few examples:
As you can imagine, electronic systems are a critical component to the successful operation of the med/surg floors that use PCs 24/7. Without a PC, documentation and charge nurse notes would need to be taken by hand. Clinical reference programs need to be online to ensure the continuity of patient care throughout the patient’s stay. In an inpatient situation, a lab test may need to be ordered.”
In a clinical setting, such as ER patient registrations, let’s say there is a waiting room full of patients…there’s only 1 person to register those patients, but the hospital can’t provide service unless they are registered.
Computers produce discharge instructions for a patient. This is important educational material required by the hospital to give the patient before sending them home. The patient can’t leave without it.
In a hospital environment, it’s not unusual for auditors to visit the Finance department for at least one full week. Before Persystent when we had an urgent request during one of these visits--- for example, computers were running sluggish or they had have malware--- it took 3 hours to clean it out.
Tell us more about your background.
“If you can believe it, I moved to Wisconsin from Montana.”
What do you like most about Persystent Suite?
“Our IS department has already seen impact with a reduction in the majority of help desk calls – all across the board. There are no real one or two obvious areas that we can quantify yet, but we already “feel” that the day to day auto repair will fix most of the help desk calls.
Thanks to Persystent Suite, we are replacing computers right away and with widespread deployment we anticipate the chance to shift our focus from reactive to proactive, so we can give our long term projects the time that they deserve.”
About Community Memorial Hospital
Providing affordable, high quality healthcare close to home is the mission at Community Memorial Hospital, an independent healthcare system located in Oconto County, WI. As a critical access hospital, the facility has 25 beds of which 23 are Adult and Pediatric specialty units and two are Intensive Care. CMH prides itself in offering a full range of services including: seven primary care clinics, 24-hour, physician-staffed Emergency Department, ICU, laboratory, medical imaging, OB/GYN-CMH Birthplace, pharmacy, outpatient oncology, rehab and surgical services. www.cmhospital.org
About Persystent Software
Founded in 2002, Persystent Software has been instrumental to organizations in government, healthcare and education sectors with limited resources to support a high ratio of employees to IT staff and 24/7 business uptime. Persystent Software solutions ensure that end-user desktop and laptop computers are always available and fully functional – whether in the office or on the road. Persystent Software has developed the world’s fastest automated PC recovery product that restores application and operating system (O/S) files that are corrupted, changed or missing with just a simple reboot of the computer.
For more information on Persystent Software and its solutions, visit: www.persystent.com.