VeriSM™ Professional Courseware. Helen Morris

IT) and the second under the insurance administration, which also has its own Finance and HR departments. Both IT departments have a primary data center as do several of the hospitals. This system was created during the original merger with the management philosophy of ‘keep things running – give them whatever they want’. As such, uncontrolled growth in applications and technology solutions is the norm. That practice has now stopped through tough and non-flexible corporate policies, but the impact is still felt – there are over 1,500 distinct applications and over half of them are duplicate instances of applications. There are multiple systems available to complete most clinical tasks. Fortunately, there is only one ERP solution, but there is little automation. There are several initiatives at varying stages of maturity to improve processes – both business and IT.

      There is a WAN connecting all the various hospitals and clinics via several overlapping SONET rings. Outlying clinics and physician offices use multiple connectivity methods to connect to the hospital systems network. The strategic leadership recognizes the higher costs associated with redundant organizations and data centers. The efforts to integrate/consolidate the redundancies have had mixed success.

      Storage is not an issue in any data center. The storage architecture and equipment are the same in all data centers. Between all systems, there are 14 Petabytes of data (and rapidly growing) being managed.

      There is a total of 12 data centers supporting FCH. These data centers are all within a 120-mile area, and a new data center is being built that will be centrally located between the two main trauma hospitals. This new data center will allow the shutdown of six of the outlying data centers. To ensure security and compliance-regulated “separation of (staff) duties”, physical access to the new data center will be granted only two days per week, and only to a very short list of IT operations staff members. One of the main Level 1 data centers which is 22 miles away will be the redundant site for the new data center (specified data only). This data center will be expanded as part of the new data center build.

      The print architecture is antiquated and has daily service disruptions. Availability of the printing services averages 93.2%. Printing is a critical service, even with ‘green’ initiatives. While staff within the system can enter and/or access any necessary information online, any discharge instructions, copies of patient medical records, etc. are still provided to the patients on paper.

      IT Service Management

      The help desk is the centrally known aspect of the IT department for FCH. There is a staff of 16 to cover the 24x7 operation. The number of calls to the help desk has doubled over the past two years while the staff supporting the help desk has not increased. Call wait times and call abandonment rate are unacceptable. Customer satisfaction is at an all-time low. A self-service portal has been deployed but has had limited success – it is not well-utilized by the customers and no attempt to understand why has occurred.

      Financial management is under increasing scrutiny, as customer groups and executive management are demanding accurate costs and billing, by customer group. Currently costs are estimated for each line of business manually by each IT manager – though that practice may have served well in the past, the current economic climate will no longer tolerate the inaccuracies. Additionally, as customers must pay for services, they are also demanding better reporting on usage and expected performance. No longer is the “shoot from the hip” or “fly by the seat of one’s pants” style of management or reporting tolerated.

      There are four service management tools in use within FCH. These tools support several ITIL-based processes. Not all tools support all processes nor do all tools share information. Processes deployed across the FCH are incident management, event management, problem management, change management, capacity management, supplier management, and configuration management. Access management, request fulfillment, IT service continuity management and knowledge management are used in some areas but there is no coordination or consistency across the organization.