News
Accreditation improves IT help-desk services for NHS Blackburn and
East Lancs
18 November 2009
The Primary Care Informatics Unit (PCIU) providing IT services
to NHS Blackburn with Darwen and NHS East Lancashire has improved its
help-desk service after achieving the National Service Desk
Accreditation last year.
The shared service, which covers a large area in North West England,
manages up to 250 IT-related calls a day from community staff, nearly
one hundred GP practices and sixty locations within its remit.
As part of its drive to achieve National Accreditation, the team
adopted ITIL-based service management software Sostenuto last year.
The Accreditation took nine months to achieve, and recognised the
successful implementation of robust processes for incident, problem and
change management. It brought about measurable benefits by allowing the
PCIU to escalate queries to its local service providers directly, thus
circumventing the national service desk. Removing a step from the
escalation process has meant significant savings in time and effort for
the PCIU.
IT section manager Matt Dyson said, “Users have seen a vast
improvement since we implemented Sostenuto. Jobs get resolved much
faster since we no longer have to go through the national service desk,
and we have been able to automatically allocate jobs to engineers via
email.”
In addition to its ITIL based modules, the PCIU also uses the order
management functionality in Sostenuto to support the activities of its
IT purchasing team. This provides it with greater control over the
process of purchasing IT equipment, and it is expecting to generate
significant savings by making reporting on its overall purchasing
available to senior management in the near future.
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