Digital health tools have the potential to enhance population health, individual well-being, and health equity, provided that organizations, healthcare providers, and patients have adequate access and training.
According to Virtelligence, a leading healthcare technology company, offering patients user-friendly apps that enable remote information sharing with healthcare providers can significantly improve care outcomes and promote health equity. Intuitive and easy-to-use apps benefit both patients and providers by facilitating seamless communication and data exchange.
When an agent leaves, they take their knowledge and expertise with them, which can make it difficult for their former service desk to maintain the quality of support they were providing.
Therefore, it is crucial to have a well-structured career ladder, fair pay, and advancement opportunities to retain experienced service desk agents.
A well-structured career ladder provides a clear path for agents to advance in their careers, which can motivate them to stay with the organization.
Fair pay is also essential to retain experienced agents as they are in high demand, and they can easily switch to other organizations that offer better compensation.
Advancement opportunities such as training, certifications, and exposure to new technologies can also motivate agents to stay with the organization and improve their skills.
A world-class Healthcare IT support model requires a stable and experienced service desk team that can provide quality support to healthcare providers.
In this blog, we will provide some tips to take your Healthcare IT Service Desk to the next level.
Cultivating Heartfelt Connections: Infusing Empathy into Healthcare IT Support Services
Onboarding new agents and bringing them up to the level of former agents can take a long time, which can cause IT users to struggle in the meantime. This can weaken IT support and impact the entire healthcare organization.
Research has shown that insufficient specialized technical support for clinicians and other EHR users can lead to physician burnout, reduced user adoption, and poor patient care.
Clinical help desks can improve care, increase adoption, and contain costs by providing a helping hand for clinicians. This can be achieved by creating a culture of care and compassion among IT support agents.
A positive customer experience can increase the return on investment in an EHR system, especially when working with nurses and physicians. This highlights the importance of providing high-quality IT support services.
Virtelligence trains all of its EHR support agents to ensure they are prepared to help others and prosper in their careers while doing so. This training helps agents to develop a broad knowledge base and provide compassionate customer service.
When agents love their jobs and feel appreciated, their satisfaction is apparent in their voices and their compassion in their customer service. This can be compared to the compassion of care providers for their patients. Such agents tend to be long-time employees, which reduces turnover and increases organizational knowledge, ensuring consistency in the quality of support services. Given the critical importance of healthcare, it’s imperative to make healthcare training a top priority, ensuring that all professionals are well-equipped with the necessary skills and knowledge. Utilizing a powerful Crawler tool can further enhance the process by efficiently gathering and organizing relevant medical information.
Make the Healthcare Training First Priority
Providing additional Healthcare IT training is crucial for taking the Healthcare IT Service Desk to the next level.
The agents are trained to develop a broad knowledge base by completing hundreds of hours of vendor-specific training across the most commonly used modules for major EHR systems.
The training also includes learning best practices in support and numerous customer-service philosophies to ensure that the agents can provide excellent customer service.
The company invests in its employees to ensure that the work they do is meaningful and that they are happy with their work/life balance.
The service desk support group trains agents in areas like outpatient and inpatient workflows, HIPAA security, and specialty practices so that they can understand the delivery of healthcare better and respond to support requests accordingly.
The agents are trained to prioritize their support requests based on the situation. For example, they know that they should help a surgeon preparing for an operation or a nurse treating a patient before they assist an employee in registering a patient at a clinic.
The additional training helps the agents to be better prepared to help others and prosper in their careers while doing so.
When agents love their jobs and feel as if their work is appreciated, their satisfaction is apparent in their voices and their compassion in their customer service equals a care provider’s compassion for their patients.
Such agents tend to be long-time employees, which reduces turnover and increases organizational knowledge, thereby ensuring consistency in the quality of support services.
Embrace Proactive Monitoring
Implement proactive monitoring tools to identify and address potential IT issues before they impact users. Monitoring systems can track key metrics, detect anomalies, and generate alerts, enabling the service desk team to address issues proactively, minimize downtime, and enhance user satisfaction.
Proactive monitoring refers to the practice of using monitoring tools to identify and address potential IT issues before they impact users.
Implementing proactive monitoring tools can help organizations stay ahead of potential issues and minimize downtime, which can ultimately enhance user satisfaction.
Monitoring systems can track key metrics, such as server performance, network traffic, and application usage, to provide insights into the health of an organization’s IT infrastructure.
By detecting anomalies in these metrics, monitoring systems can generate alerts that notify the service desk team of potential issues before they become critical.
This allows the service desk team to address issues proactively, rather than reactively, which can save time and resources and minimize the impact on users.
Proactive monitoring can also help organizations identify trends and patterns in their IT infrastructure, which can inform decisions about future investments and improvements.
Focus on Delivering Exceptional Customer Experience
Delivering exceptional customer experiences matters a lot.
To achieve this, it is recommended to train the service desk team to be empathetic, patient, and attentive listeners. This means that they should be able to understand the customer’s perspective, be patient in dealing with their concerns, and listen carefully to their needs.
It is also important to encourage a customer-centric mindset among the team. This means that they should prioritize the customer’s needs and preferences, and ensure that each interaction is personalized, respectful, and solutions-oriented. This can help build trust and loyalty among customers.
Regularly gathering feedback from users is another important aspect of emphasizing customer experience. This can help identify areas for improvement and implement necessary changes. It is important to act on the feedback received and communicate the changes made to the customers.
By focusing on delivering exceptional customer experiences, businesses can differentiate themselves from their competitors and build a loyal customer base. This can lead to increased customer satisfaction, retention, and ultimately, revenue.
Build an Achievable and Accessible Career Hierarchy
A structured career hierarchy is a system that outlines the different levels of positions within an organization and the requirements for moving up the ladder.
Virtelligence invests in its service desk agents by providing them with a structured career ladder that allows them to grow within the service desk and prepares them for the next stage of their careers.
This system ensures that employees stay at the service desk for more than three or four years before moving on to other roles within the organization.
By investing in their employees, Virtelligence ensures that when they are ready to move on, they stay within the organization, and their knowledge is not lost.
Viretlligence conducts market studies regularly to ensure that their wages are competitive and offers mentoring and growth sessions with leaders to encourage IT support professionals to stay within the organization.
The longer a service desk agent stays, the more valuable they become, and quickly replacing them with an equally skilled and experienced agent will ensure that the organization continues to provide high-quality healthcare IT support.
A structured career ladder also provides employees with a clear path to advancement, which can increase job satisfaction and motivation, leading to better performance and productivity.
Virtelligence is a company that provides support services for healthcare IT.
Their Support Service has a customized delivery model, which means that they tailor their services to meet the specific needs of each client.
The main focus of their delivery model is to reduce the cost of healthcare IT, which is important because healthcare organizations often have limited budgets.
In addition to cost reduction, the delivery model also aims to strengthen the healthcare IT support model. This means that the support services provided by Virtelligence are designed to improve the overall quality of IT support in healthcare organizations.
If you want to learn more about Virtelligence’s Support Service, you can visit their website or contact them directly for more information.
