Healthcare organization manages systems, IT costs with Compuware

Healthcare organization New Hanover Regional Medical Center reduced help desk calls, improved availability of critical systems and lessened virus outbreaks all while better managing IT costs – with the help of Compuware.

When an organizational assessment proved the IT department at New Hanover Regional Medical Center couldn’t adequately provide service equal to the demands, CIO Avery Cloud decided an investment in management software would improve the group’s maturity level. New Hanover’s IT team, in Wilmington, N.C., supported some 4,700 internal end users and 500 physicians in the community, Cloud says, requiring future updates to electronic medical records, remote services, outpatient clinics and computerized physician order entry.

“One thing that motivated the desire to work up our maturity level was the forecast for future demand for IT services,” Cloud says. “Clearly we need to make some adjustments and to add automation to increase our organization’s maturity level and find tools to help us run the business of IT.”

That’s when Cloud began an evaluation process that led him to purchasing two applications from Compuware: Vantage for systems performance monitoring from the end-user perspective; and Changepoint for visibility into IT investments to manage costs. Cloud says he chose the vendor for the integration between its products and the benefits gained from the two applications working together.

“We found Compuware to be the best integrated toolkit end to end. We found single tools that may have been better than some of the modules in the Compuware products, but we couldn’t find anything in the market at the time that had all the pieces end-to-end in an integrated way.”

The results helped New Hanover advance its maturity – it remains a work in progress – and achieve several improvements across its service delivery groups. For one, the healthcare organization was able to reduce help desk drop calls by 65% and improved the availability of mission-critical systems by 40%. Compuware tools helped New Hanover improve response time on three primary clinical systems by 15%, reduced computer virus infections by 100% and improved customer satisfaction of projects delivered by 15%.”

“Changepoint gave us a way to create repeatable quality. The workflow engine locks folks into a stepwise process that checklist to ensure processes are done the same way by different groups,” Cloud says. “Vantage offers us an early warning system so we can get ahead of problems and helps us hold our vendors accountable.”

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Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.