California Hospital treats HIPAA issues

HOUSTON, USA: A news release by MemorialCare Health System (MHS) announces a huge IT shift it has undertaken.

As it explains: To serve a network of six leading hospitals across southern California, MemorialCare Health System (MHS) relies on highly specialized technology to diagnose and treat patients. For obvious reasons, it’s absolutely necessary that computer systems work flawlessly.Streamlined IT operations are a key factor in making sure the hospital network runs smoothly. Before selecting BMC Software, MHS could not efficiently manage IT requests from all of its medical facilities. What’s more, the hospital system did not have an automated system to track computer and software assets in real time.

This collective gap in the MHS IT management capability had a direct and profoundly negative effect on customer satisfaction. “Prior to selecting BMC Software, we had no way of determining the number of IT assets we had. We spent an exorbitant amount of time gathering this information and manually entering it into a database,” explained Terolyn Phinsee, project manager at MHS. “Today, our successful implementation of BMC Track-It! has produced a measurable increase in customer satisfaction, with an overall score of 95 percent for ‘quick response to issue.’”

The Challenge was that MHS lacked an efficient method for tracking and assigning help desk requests between hospitals. The company also needed a way to track hospital hardware and software assets in real time, without inundating internal IT resources. Finally, MHS needed to ensure it was compliant with healthcare security regulations such as HIPAA Administrative Safegaurds.

MHS states that it reviewed a number of help desk solutions, including the FrontRange HEAT product. The hospital network selected the Track-It! solution from BMC Software for its superior customization capabilities, ease of use, flexibility and automated workflow. The BMC solution was in full production at MHS within eight hours. Once implemented, the organization experienced the following immediate benefits like Increased employee and patient satisfaction with IT service and support; real-time view of all computer and software assets across all six hospitals and the ability to assign work orders to technicians at any site; improved help desk agent workflow to quickly and efficiently solve IT problems and requests and improved compliance to healthcare regulations such as HIPAA.