Service management

Technology in action: Leicestershire Health Informatics Service

Integrated IT service management for Leicestershire health community

The Leicestershire Health Informatics Service (LHIS) is responsible for the strategic and operational direction of the IT service desk for the local health community across Leicestershire and Rutland. It promotes communications and develops IT solutions to support the health services for the local population.

The local health community consists of more than 10,000 users based at over 250 sites across the region. LHIS has nine service desk analysts who handle around 750 incidents per week, but this can rise to 4,000 a month. These incidents can be allocated to over 100 staff based within 15 distinct support groups.

To deliver the best possible service to its clients, it is essential that LHIS has a robust but flexible service-desk system in place.

Already a long-term customer, LHIS decided to migrate to Touchpaper's IT Business Management (ITBM) suite to assist with the implementation of the industry-standard ITIL best-practice framework for incident, problem and change management.

Touchpaper’s ITIL service framework was the driving factor for migrating to the ITBM suite, specifically its flexible process engine, which can be adapted to all areas of service.

The new software facilitates automated, more-effective communication between the central service desk of LHIS and other IT stakeholders including LHIS staff, the local primary care trusts (PCTs), other health agencies, GPs and the three local authorities.

The new system was installed in just under four months. It offers LHIS a wide range of modular but integrated ITIL-verified applications covering incident, problem, change, process management and self-service.

Granular reporting capabilities give a strategic tool that helps LHIS monitor the effectiveness of the process improvements it has put in place, thereby creating a more proactive approach to delivering informatics services. The significant advancement of the built-in query and reporting functionality means that LHIS no longer has to tie up valuable internal resources to produce the quarterly service level report which it provides to its clients.

Self-service technology allows users to log and track the progress of their calls themselves at any time and from any place, further underpinning the public sector ethos of adopting ‘smarter', more efficient working.

More-complex support requests can be electronically managed, ensuring faster problem resolution and a significant improvement over the quality of service provided. The solution comprehensively addresses the major challenges of resource optimisation and increased user demand facing today’s support environment within the health service.

Will Legge, Service Delivery Manager for LHIS, said: "We are confident that Touchpaper’s technology will provide an efficient IT framework in which to work that can help us to make better decisions and manage our IPC process.”