Technologically Advanced Regional Hospital Chooses Persystent Suite to Rapidly Image PCs and Reduce Help Desk Tickets
| Industry: |
Healthcare |
 |
| Number of PCs: |
400 |
| IT Challenge: |
Small IT Staff Supporting 24/7 PC Users |
| Solution: |
Persystent Suite |
Q&A with Gary Neat, Director of Information Technology and Jeff Perry, Systems Engineer
How many people are staffed in your I.T. department?
Gary: There are five including myself and Jeff. We have three application analysts: one business, one nursing and one clinical. Our application analysts have backgrounds in their respective fields, for example our nursing analyst used to be an RN and our clinical analyst used to be a CT tech. Together, the five of us support 650 users and 400 desktops here at Taylor Regional Hospital.
Could you describe a day in your life as an I.T. administrator?
Gary: Team members here at TRH will generally call the Analyst assigned to their area for support with software, or will contact Jeff or I for hardware support. Aside from that my day is usually consumed by meetings, running the I.T. department, and managing our Electronic Health Record initiative. As the project manager for our conversion to an electronic medical records (EMR) system, I’m responsible for making sure all phases of the rollout occur effectively. We’re currently in phase two of the project.
Jeff: I deal with the hardware. For example, today I will be rolling out workstations for status boards in our Operating Room. I usually go all day long because we have a lot to support. In the morning, I’ll do back-ups and answer user questions from the previous day or night. Usually these questions arise when a printer or an application stops working. Currently we support the HIS system, our old medical information system (not EMR) while we are concurrently implementing our new EMR system.
Tell us more about your background.
Gary: I started out as a help desk specialist at Campbellsville University. After two years there I was hired by Taylor Regional Hospital as their first I.T. support. They had previously outsourced their network support. Since I’ve been with TRH, we have really grown standardizing our electronic medical records and building the I.T. staff up to five.
Jeff: I joined the Navy right out of high school. After the Navy I wasn’t quite sure what to do next, so I took a job as a cable installer and taught myself how to build computers on the side. After a few years of installing Cat 5 cables, I decided to change careers and received an Associates Degree in I.T. from Elizabethtown Community College in Kentucky. After graduation I was hired by Campbellsville University and after a couple of years followed Gary to TRH.
What do you like best about your work?
Gary: I came to work at Taylor Regional Hospital because it offered an opportunity to make a real difference in patient care and technology. In the past, I.T. was perceived as only providing support. Now we are seen as trend setters, making a direct impact on patient care as we implement tools that will optimize patient safety.
Jeff: Taylor Regional Hospital gives us an opportunity to work with emerging technology that will keep us on the edge of patient care. We are a small regional hospital with a vision to offer the best in technology that will give users and patients the same quality of care they could find in a major metropolitan area.
Was there a compelling event that drove you to search for a product like Persystent Suite?
Gary: We were looking for a solution to make our (I.T. department) lives easier. There are only five of us on staff and we are responsible for 650 users and 400 desktops. We were getting too many day-to-day calls about broken PCs. We saw a demo of Persystent Suite at an Angelbeat I.T. seminar and we were sold.
How are you using Persystent Suite in your environment?
Jeff: What’s nice about Persystent Suite is that it gives us the ability to not only lock down work stations but also image machines and provision them quickly. Implementing our EMR system and bedside documentation meant we had to push out a lot of machines at once. Over the past three weeks we have pushed out 150 machines to patient rooms. We couldn’t have done this without Persystent Suite.
Could you describe your implementation of Persystent Suite?
Gary: One of the great things about Persystent Suite was how it easy it was to set up on our system. I was really impressed that Jeff handled the implementation with the help of the Persystent tech support staff.
Jeff: We started our roll out six weeks ago and so far it is going great. We’ve had no major issues. We were probably different from most Persystent customers in that we needed to push the image via a wireless network. We suspect that most Persystent Suite customers intend for it to be a solution where you put the machine on the floor and push the image via a wired network. Since we had a short time-frame to implement Persystent Suite, we didn’t have time to attend a training seminar. The support team was outstanding in helping us implement the software. It took a few extra steps but we got the job done with relative ease.
What do you like most about Persystent Suite?
Gary: What I like the most about Persystent Suite is that our Persystent PCs work every time. We are the first organization in this area to standardize on patient bedside solutions. In the medical community, it’s a deviation from the norm as most hospitals use mobile carts. Instead of designing a documentation workflow around a cart, we can document in the room one on one with the patient, as well as always having a machine available for bedside medication verification. We need our machines to be readily available, secure and operational in a patient’s room. Information is vital to the care of our patients, so we chose a technology to guarantee the availability at the bedside. We use them in our emergency room, operating room and cardiology unit – areas where minutes count.
Jeff: I would say the ease of going from a new model to rolling an imaged machine out. The process of pushing a new client out is so fast. It’s really amazing. Also, as Gary mentioned, with Persystent we don’t have to worry about having to repair a PC in the middle of an emergency. Since we implemented, we haven’t had any issues where we’ve had to send a member of our staff. Even in the event of a situation, we’re confident that it will take less time to bring a PC back with Persystent Suite.
About Taylor Regional Hospital
Taylor Regional Hospital, part of the Jewish Hospital Health Network, is dedicated to providing outstanding medical care by serving over 110,000 people who live in Campbellsville, KY and the Central Kentucky regional service area. TRH offers a wide range of specialties including The Cancer Center, a Level III Trauma Center, Cardiopulmonary Rehab, General and Outpatient Surgery, Home Health Medicine and OBGYN services. In 2007, TRH opened a Wound Healing Center for patients with chronic wounds. Families can get a virtual tour of the web nursery, and “new arrival” announcements from proud parents can be found online For more information about Taylor Regional Hospital please visit http://www.trhosp.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 only automated PC recovery product on the market with unsurpassed speed – restoring 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.