Reduce resource drain with enterprise automation and integration.
Improved ticket triage, workflow and escalation expedites resolution.
Visualize timelines and resources allocations on one platform.
Industry: Healthcare
End-users: 3,500
Previous System: Cherwell
Data is the currency that makes our healthcare system operate. Without seamless, secure and on-demand access to patient information, healthcare providers can’t deliver the quality of care their patients have come to expect.
The IT departments that ensure this access are essential to the success of healthcare organizations. Self Regional Healthcare, which provides advanced healthcare services to residents in seven South Carolina counties, relies on TeamDynamix to manage IT service and projects in a highly efficient and reliable manner. Self Regional Healthcare includes a 421-bed medical center in Greenwood, S.C., that serves as the referral hospital for the seven South Carolina counties known as the Lakelands.
The medical center houses a cancer center, a heart center, a women’s center, and a wound healing institute. Self Regional also includes the Self Medical Group, a multispecialty practice that includes more than 75 physicians. This health system is growing quickly, according to Nikole Cabral, an IT analyst and project manager for Self Regional, “We have no less than four new practices onboarding now.”
With such rapid expansion, onboarding new physicians and contractors can be challenging. These new employees and contractors need the proper security clearances and IT accounts as soon as possible—and any bottlenecks can interfere with patient care.
Expedited service with enterprise integration and automated workflows.
Flexible, simplistic design for configuration of workflow, automation and integration.
Self Regional is using TeamDynamix to automate key tasks associated with this onboarding process, ensuring a smooth transition. “A lot of IT time is spent just completing the tasks involved in setting up new user accounts. That’s definitely a good chunk of our day-to-day work,” Cabral says. “TeamDynamix has helped us automate many of those tasks.”
A highly flexible platform for managing IT and enterprise service tickets, projects, assets and changes, TeamDynamix allows users to create their own unique service categories and build automated workflows for managing multistep processes—without any knowledge of coding required. The platform’s enterprise integration and automation layer enable IT staff to create integrations between TeamDynamix and other software programs using a simple, drag-and-drop process along with a library of pre-built connectors. As a result, organizations can easily create workflows for automating almost any service function to fit their needs.
“We are using a pre-built integration from TeamDynamix to add users to an Active Directory group, which takes the burden off of our service desk to add users manually,” Cabral says. “This automation will alleviate 20 to 30 weekly tasks from hitting the help desk once it’s fully built out. We’re very excited about that.”
Increasing efficiency is critical for Self Regional’s IT team, which supports about 3,500 end-users with a team of 90 analysts. “We usually onboard chunks of people at a time,” Cabral says. “We may have to onboard 40 end-users at once, for example.” By automating key aspects, TeamDynamix has simplified this process and saved a tremendous amount of time for IT staff.
TeamDynamix also helps organizations create customized online service catalogs and dynamic forms for collecting information from users about the nature of their service requests. The information collected during this process allows for tickets to be routed automatically to the appropriate team members for a response, thus reducing the time to resolution.
“One of the biggest problems we had with our previous ticketing system was tickets bouncing around among many different teams before landing in the right bucket to get resolved,” Cabral says. It would sometimes take weeks for tickets to be resolved if they weren’t a high priority. “Even if it’s just a service request,” she notes, “we still want a much faster turnaround time.”
Once Self Regional went live with Epic, an electronic health records management system, a few years ago, it became very challenging for help desk staff to recognize which team should receive which service requests. After implementing TeamDynamix, Cabral met with each service team to develop questions that would help users identify the specific nature of their requests more effectively.
“We were able to build automation rules within TeamDynamix to take the answers to these questions in the service forms and route tickets to the appropriate teams,” she says. “Now, tickets are getting to the right teams with the information those teams need to resolve the issue right away, which was our goal. I’m very proud of that. It took a lot of significant work, but I’m so happy that TeamDynamix even had that capability.”
This automated routing of tickets gets service requests into the hands of the right people faster, which leads to quicker problem resolution.
“It has definitely increased our turnaround speed,” Cabral says. “We used to average well over 1,000 tickets, maybe 1,500 tickets, that were constantly open. Now, we average maybe 700 to 800. So, we’ve cut this number in half. That’s significant.”
Improved triage and workflow decreased resolution time leading to reduced open ticket volume and improved customer satisfaction.
TeamDynamix supports not only IT and enterprise service management but also project portfolio management (PPM), something that Self Regional’s old ticketing system couldn’t do. “We were managing projects across various systems before,” Cabral says. As a result, leaders didn’t have full visibility into the scope of work that each team member was involved in.
“We have over 70 projects we’re tracking in TeamDynamix right now,” she says. “Almost every single analyst has a hand in those projects.
We have to balance each employee’s time between doing break-fix work, offering support and onboarding, and completing projects.” Having an easy way to track and manage all of this activity in one platform “has completely changed the game” for IT managers and other organizational leaders, Cabral notes.
She explains: “Before, there was no way for us to see how much time and effort was being put into projects by IT staff. Now, Operations recognizes how big of a role IT plays in every single project. If we’re onboarding a location, that involves significant IT work. Even if it’s something minor, like a department moving locations, that can also mean updating network IP addresses. There might be small things we can change pretty quickly, but we had no way of quantifying that work before.”
The system has bridged the gaps in communication, demonstrated the value that IT brings to the organization, and helped leaders manage expectations and allocate IT employees’ time more effectively—which Cabral describes as “fantastic.” “We have the visuals now,” she says. “We have the project list, and we can show Operations: Here’s our resource allocation for the next three months. Anybody in red, they’re overscheduled, and we need to reassess things.”
Prior to TeamDynamix Self Regional was using a different ITSM tool that had been bought out by another ITSM company, “We were going to have to either reimplement what we had, or migrate to the company’s other system,” Cabral said. “We decided to look at other alternatives.”
“Comparatively, TeamDynamix was very similar to what we were using and codeless with the functionality we would need as far as supporting our needs, but also had all these extra features like project management and integration and automation,” she continued.
Implementing TeamDynamix was a seamless experience as well, Cabral reports. “I loved having a dedicated consultant,” she observes. “The TeamDynamix team was incredibly helpful.”
Standing up the portal was simple, she says, because “if you were building out a form for TeamDynamix, you were building it out in the portal at the same time. We really didn’t have many issues crop up. I was told our Phase One go-live was a ‘nonevent,’ which is very complimentary. And it’s only gotten better.”
Cabral said for IT staff, it’s easier for them to keep track of their tickets in TeamDynamix.
By switching to TeamDynamix for its IT service and project management, Self Regional Healthcare has been able to serve end-users more effectively, leading to a better overall user experience. This, in turn, will continue to fuel growth for the organization. “TeamDynamix has definitely met all of our expectations for what we needed,” Cabral concludes.
