WIRELESS TECHNOLOGY

Wireless Technology

Wireless Technology

Introduction

An HMO, Health Maintenance Organization, is a specific type of health care plan found in the United States. Unlike traditional health coverage, an HMO sets out guidelines under which doctors can operate. Sophisticated technologies - from patient care to business process applications - serve as key components for the HMO's continued success as a highly efficient organization. Approximately 8000 IT professionals are employed to keep these systems smoothly running, with a minimum of interruptions as the constant goal.

Business Need

With so many employees depending on technology to successfully perform their jobs, the HMO's IT department needed a reliable system to receive alerts of trouble tickets generated in the organization's help desk software application. Missed or delayed alerts resulted in repeated requests - and lengthy incident response times. What's more, management realized fast IT incident resolution was essential to uninterrupted patient care in their medical facilities, and business continuity throughout the organization. Because of this, management required real-time update and status of all trouble tickets.

Challenge

The HMO's technical support manager for Help Desk operations inherited a huge IT headache when he joined the organization six years ago. “We had a legacy help desk system in place, but the paging software that was integrated with it was only sending about 80% of the generated trouble tickets,” he recalled. “One of my primary projects when I came on board was to resolve this issue.”

Individual PC, email, and network security problems make up the majority of trouble tickets, but interrupted patient care applications can be an occasional issue. Previously used paging software did not offer redundancy in the event of system failure, and management wanted this capability in place to avert any delayed stoppages in critical patient care and business applications. Finally, when legacy help desk software was upgraded to the more powerful and ...