Prime Healthcare Services and Manage Engine

Prime Healthcare Services and Manage Engine

Outline:

Introduction

- Who is Prime Healthcare

- Who am I, what is my role

Challenges

-Grew from 3 hospitals to 13 hospitals in 4 years

-Need to coordinate efforts of 100 I.T. professions spread across 14 facilities

-Needed an “out-of-the-box” solution

-Brining up a call center for 13 hospitals in 2 months

Solutions

-ServiceDeskPlus

-ADManager

-DesktopCentral

Close

Good [morning / afternoon], my name is Jason Beckett, Enterprise Systems Administrator and Helpdesk Manager with Prime Healthcare Services. Today I am going to be discussing some of the challenges we encountered as an organization and how Manage Engine helped us to overcome these challenges. But first, a little bit about Prime Healthcare.

Today, Prime Healthcare Services owns and operates fourteen acute care hospitals in southern and northern California and employs more than 9,000 people. Now Prime Healthcare started as a single hospital system and quickly grew to a three hospital system. At this point in our history, managing I.T. service delivery was still ran much like a small business. The I.T. department handled requests as they came and most requests were received either by phone or email. One hospital was using TrackIt but not very effectively. Then, starting in 2004 we grew from 3 hospitals to by the end of 2009, 13 hospitals. Suddenly we have a large number I.T. staff and a very large number of customers to serve.

Some problems became immediately visible. A technician would receive requests for support while walking through a hallway or over the phone and then not follow through. A requester couldn’t check the status of their request and if a technician was out sick then no one else had knowledge of the request. We were not tracking the issues that were being received by the on-call technician after hours and thus not performing any root cause analysis. Most costly of all is that we weren’t quantifying the work that I.T. was performing.

At this volume it was no longer tenable to continue to deliver services “on the fly”. We had to implement a system that we could deliver I.T. services in a controlled, measurable and accountable way. We knew we needed something “out-of-the-box” as we are a healthcare system not a software company and I don’t have a small army of software engineers ready to customize a solution for us. We also needed a software solution that supported a permissions hierarchy for supporting multiple sites. Additionally, each hospital was a part of its own Active Directory forest. We examined several systems, all at different price points and feature offerings and then ManageEngine came to our attention. The 90:10 motto of ManageEngine resonated with our mission of delivering quality, compassionate care in a cost-effective manner. So in 2008 we selected ServiceDeskPlus and have added 10 of our 14 hospitals on to the system and have over 80 technician accounts in use. We plan to have all 14 hospitals on the system by July of this year.

We realized the value of ServiceDeskPlus immediately with the application delivered as a website rather than an installed client. Users quickly started leveraging opening requests via email and we could start running reports of the requests we were receiving. We have been very satisified with ServiceDeskPlus from both a product and support perspective. One of our challenges when we went live with ServiceDeskPlus was that another facility had another instance of ServiceDeskPlus running. We were able to work with support under a paid engagement to merge the two databases together and this was completed very successfully.

A couple of caveats that have improved our experience with the ServiceDeskPlus product are:

1. We have gotten better at using the rules. In the beginning we didn’t use the rules at all but we have come to realize how useful they are within the application and this has improved our productivity with the application.
2. We had to embrace ITIL. We didn’t have much in house expertise to speak of when it comes to ITIL and so certain functions within ServiceDeskPlus really confused us. What has really helped us is the two documents put out by Manage Engine: ITIL Hereos Handbook, ITIL based Heldesk for SMBs and When Reality Hits ITIL Implementation. We’ve also taken ITIL courses but have found these documents published by Manage Engine to summarize the important points of ITIL very concisely. Out of our ITIL education we are using with a greater degree of efficiency priority levels, urgency levels, ticket categorization and problem analysis.

In 2010 we undertook the project of setting up a centralized call center. ServiceDeskPlus would be our primary tool for tracking and assigning requests but we needed another tool to efficiently manage Active Directory password resets across 14 domains. For this requirement we purchased ADManager Pro. ADManager Pro has been an ideal solution for our environment because it gives access to all of our disparate domains into a single view greatly easing the steps the Helpdesk Operators need to endure to reset a password.

We have also invested in DesktopCentral and Password Manager Plus. Overall we like the feature set of DesktopCentral and the price point of the product. We’ve used the product to push applications and perform routine maintenance on desktops. However given the overlapping feature sets of ServiceDeskPlus and DesktopCentral we wish DesktopCentral would be sold as an add-on to SDP rather than as a separate product.

Password Manager Plus we invested in to create a central repository of the passwords for our systems across all of our hospitals. Let me be honest, the product under delivers. Now, it might be somewhat unexpected to say that in a forum like this but I think our experience with PMP has been a reflection of the ManageEngine. One day, when I was at my wits end with PMP I shot off a long email to Chakravarthy whom I had worked with closely on our ServiceDeskPlus migration. The next day the PMP project manager gave me a call to hear my concerns. Within a week I had a patch to address the issue that I was experiencing. Now I tell this story not because I’m now a fan of Password Manager Plus; there are still a few features I am hoping for before I give a resounding endorsement of the product, but my experience in this case that I am working with a company that understands our requirements and is truly seeking to meet those requirements.

One last note, since I know there are some ManageEngine folks here today and I just won’t let this opportunity pass. I have a wish list. Quickly, in SDP they are:

1. A technician as requester view. As I frequently assign tasks to my staff through ServiceDeskPlus and there isn’t a very facile way for me to be able to view tasks that I’ve assigned apart from column filters which isn’t very quick. Yes I know I can build a custom filter but I don’t want to have to explain that to 14 managers.
2. Business Rules should always update the history of the ticket which the rule was executed against. I don’t know how this got missed in development but if a rule is performing some important action like say paging a technician I would like the job history to reflect this action.
3. Business Rules need a time condition.
4. True centralized administration of scheduled reports. We have several issues come up with scheduled reports being viewable only by the technician that created the report. The SDAdmin role should be able to see all scheduled reports.

That’s everything I have for today. My name is Jason Beckett. My email address is and I can be found on LinkedIn as well if you would like to discuss any of the items I mentioned. Collaboration benefits all of us so I appreciate any input or additional questions you may have. Thank you.