All hospital Chief Information Officers (CIOs) must assess whether to internally manage the general IT support for their user communities (help desk and desk side assistance) or to outsource certain core functions to a Managed Services Provider (MSP). Before making this decision, it’s helpful to understand the value a dedicated, healthcare-centric MSP can deliver to healthcare organizations of all sizes.
Consider the role of hospital CIOs, who own many critical, strategic decisions across the enterprise, including EMR, cloud architecture, cyber defense, network and storage infrastructure, and disaster recovery, among others. We’ve seen how outsourcing less strategic functions to an MSP can help CIOs better focus on “big picture” items—and the big dollars that go with them. CIOs can relinquish day–to–day responsibilities for resolving user trouble tickets and completing other service requests like IMACs (installs, moves, adds, and changes) as part of getting and keeping users up and running.
At a more detailed level, there are several specific benefits I’ve witnessed with Pixel Health’s ongoing MSP relationships with healthcare practices. These include:
1. Increased operational focus and accountability
Any successful MSP vendor will be responsible and fully accountable for delivering excellent service support for users. We are expected to provide responsive, knowledgeable IT support while continuously working to improve the ROI of outsourcing for CIOs and their IT departments.
2. Customizing and measuring service levels to support the “VIPs”
Every MSP engagement includes service level agreements (SLAs) that define required service levels across the enterprise. To accommodate a CIO’s budget realities, we often help hospitals and healthcare practices prioritize support for clinicians, key hospital locations (ERs, ORs, ICUs, etc.), and VIPs with guaranteed service excellence—even during peak periods and volume spikes. However, this accommodation involves deferring standard support for other non-critical functions while the MSP continues to expedite trouble tickets for the CIO’s designated priority users. In other words, there are always enough resources to serve critical personnel and high–impact locations with an understanding/agreement that extended restoration intervals may be experienced by those users designated in the second tier of support.
At Pixel Health, we understand it’s important in a healthcare–centric support organization that you always serve the most important people, especially those working directly with patients. We can always optimize the costs to expedite service for the vital few within any budget.
3. Accessing the latest tools, technologies, and skill sets
Investing in new tools, ticketing systems, or upgrading to any number of new call center technology platforms can be costly and time–consuming for a CIO’s team. An MSP vendor is constantly vetting and implementing the latest tools and technologies to be more efficient and effective in how they support users.
4. Making incremental improvements and delivery consistency
Because Pixel Health appreciates that CIOs care deeply for the people delivering user support internally, in some cases, MSPs will encourage and embrace hiring and assuming management of the CIO’s existing IT staff.
We have seen how hiring employees from in–house IT to the MSP can be essential when transitioning to an outsourced services provider. This process ensures consistency as the transitioning staff can leverage their institutional knowledge. Combined with an MSP’s well-defined policies, practices, procedures, tools, and management, the support delivery team will become more effective and efficient at handling the daily load and driving continuous improvement, especially incident rate reduction and lowering in the meantime to restoration.
5. Sharing real–time, data–driven metrics
Hospitals fund their MSP vendors to deliver great service. That’s why Pixel Health is committed to publishing SLA results by “speaking with data” in the form of performance reports, incident rate root cause analysis, permanent fixes implemented, and diligence to measure everything that can be measured.
Because our MSP practice at Pixel Health only serves healthcare organizations, we have specifically built a comprehensive healthcare-centric reporting and analytics capability to assess total volumes. We also report how we performed against specific SLAs for critical user communities like clinicians, priority locations, and VIPs.
6. Handling the ongoing burden of HR and staffing
One of the hidden benefits of outsourcing to an MSP vendor is that they become responsible for managing employee satisfaction, retention, and the time and cost to recruit, hire, onboard, train, measure, manage, and potentially terminate/up skill individual performers. This is a massive burden that CIOs can shift to an MSP vendor, which is especially relevant for general help desk and desk side assistance personnel as the turnover rates for entry–level IT staff can be much higher than the more senior staff performing other core engineering and infrastructure management functions.
Learn more about how outsourcing IT support can help your organization meet the unique and often time–critical needs of the clinical environment.
