The Agatharied hospital is a charitable company and employs over 1,000 people. Located in the heart of Miesbach District, four hospitals were merged into a central health and care centre in 1998. The hospital now has over 350 beds and covers the complete healthcare needs of the region. Since 2004 Krankenhaus Agatharied has been the practical training location for doctors outside of university and acts as the teaching hospital for Ludwig-Maximilian-University in Munich.
Andreas Meier reports on his department and the IT infrastructure:
“We operate two data centres in the hospital and they are almost exclusively virtual. Our server infrastructure currently comprises 210 virtual machines and two to three native servers. This should also become virtual. We also manage 540 IT workstations, of which 90% are thin clients and 10% are special applications. These are mostly clinical applications such as medical device connections. At the server operating system level, we are currently managing the switch-over from Win2008 to Win2016. A few Linux servers are also used. Our devices are Windows 7 embedded but we are gradually converting to Windows 10. We manage approximately 200 printing systems as components. By the start of next year the department will have 12 employees.”
Overall using IT service management is a win-win situation for all of those involved.
Andreas Meier
IT-Manager, Hospital Agatharied
Challenge
- Acquisition of an IT Service Management (ITSM) system
- More free resources for IT staff
- Switching from Windows 7 to Windows 10
Solution
- Employees in the hospital can check IT inquiries in a controlled and targeted manner
- Shorter response times in second-level support
- Equalization of high telephone frequencies in the IT department
Mr. Meier also describes the initial position and the company’s requirements for a software management software as follows:
“When I started at hospital Agatharied in 2014, the IT department did not have a ticket system. There was an ancient system in the technical department that did not run stably. After evaluating the selection criteria, we chose Deskcenter as we were looking for a modular system that could grow with our requirements. A KPMG-certified solution that could hold its ground for future SAM audits was also important in our selection process. With Deskcenter we have been able to create an inventory of the complete IT environment and thus receive a comprehensive overview of our complete IT inventory.”
The department initially focused on IT service management:
The main reason for the purchase was, above all, to take the pressure off the IT service section of the IT department. Previously the employees had responded to all enquiries over the phone. The calls were distributed throughout the department and nearly all of the IT employees were involved with support queries. This made continuous work for second-level support virtually impossible. With the IT costs rising, we could no longer afford this. We needed to free resources.
It was great that even the technical department of the hospital, which is subdivided into electricity, sanitary, locksmith, medical technology and caretaking, can now work completely with IT service management through Deskcenter. We therefore help a lot of hospital employees to clarify their IT queries in a controlled and targeted way. Overall using IT service management is a win-win situation for all of those involved.
Since introducing Deskcenter we have been able to reduce telephone support queries from over 90% to 40%:
By using Deskcenter Management Suite we have resolved the disruption of high number of telephone calls to the IT department. We again have several IT resources free for second-level support as the telephone queries have reduced from more than 90% to currently 40%. And the web portal also offers end users high added value because they can see the current processing status, the tickets that have been submitted, are being processed and which have already been closed. On the other hand, digital entry created sustainability, which was not possible over the phone. The documentation of the ticket queries ensures a comprehensive knowledge database is available so we can handle queries quickly and specifically.