CareTech Sees Dramatic Increase in Outsourced Hospital Help Desk

TROY -- CareTech Solutions, an IT and Web products and services provider for more than 200 hospitals, Thursday announced that use of its Service Desk service increased by 75 percent in 2012. This industry-leading clinical help desk solution provides real-time IT support to clinicians and other staff from support analysts that are trained on all major hospital clinical and business information systems.

CareTech added five new Service Desk clients in 2012 with the most recent being Boulder Community Hospital and New York Hospital Queens. The company attributes the increase in utilization to a combination of clinicians coping with a steep learning curve related to the adoption of new electronic health records and other clinical systems, and the fact that IT resources are increasingly being deployed to a growing list of strategic initiatives, including implementing and integrating new clinical systems (including EHRs), connecting to community HIEs, security enhancements driven by regulatory changes ICD-10 and more.

"Today's IT departments are overwhelmed with overseeing implementations of EHRs and other electronic systems; and the demands of initiatives like ICD-10, Meaningful Use and audit compliance only increase their workload," said Jim Giordano, president and CEO, CareTech Solutions. "This has created a perfect storm where there is more technology being implemented than can be supported by in-house resources, and more demand than ever for support and fewer resources available to provide it. The fact that our teams are up to speed with the latest systems and requirements has driven the demand for our services through the roof in the last year."

CareTech introduced Service Desk in 2008 in response to an industry need for highly specialized help desk support. As organizations continue to transition to an increasingly electronic healthcare environment, fostered by government regulations like the HITECH Act and Meaningful Use, seamless IT adoption depends on a high level of rapid, responsive support. CareTech's trained analysts provide value to clinicians and hospital staff by making it easier to use these technologies in order to provide quality, compliant patient care.

"Clinician support calls have definitely increased and are more involved at our organization since the implementation of our EHR system last year," said Linda Minghella, CIO, Boulder Community Hospital. "CareTech's team is familiar with all the systems we use, is well trained as support professionals, and they are getting our clinicians back to treating patients faster and more efficiently than we ever could."

Features of CareTech Solutions Service Desk include:
• Trained and certified support analysts based in the U.S. and available 24x7x365
• Scalable operation (500 to 20,000 calls per hospital per month)
• Knowledge management
• Comprehensive implementation
• Performance metrics tracking and reporting
• Trend analysis to understand problems and reduce call volumes
• Proactive infrastructure and applications monitoring
• Physician-only hotline

For more information, please visit www.caretech.com.