Giva Customers Are Talking! Athens Regional Health System Case Study
Athens Regional Health System is one of northeast Georgia's largest healthcare systems. ARHS is made up of an acute care hospital with 350-plus beds, four urgent care centers, a network of quality physicians and specialists, and a home health agency. ARHS was named the Large Hospital of the Year for the State of Georgia by the Georgia Alliance of Community Hospitals. Today, ARHS is recognized as one of the top 100 hospitals in the nation preferred by women.
The Challenge
Having a quality IT system is critical in running any efficient business, and a large hospital such as ARHS is no exception. Louis Duhé, Vice President and CIO, says that the hospital needed a new solution to their IT needs—one that was more efficient than their current in-house developed help desk application.
Duhé notes that they were unable to track Service Level Agreements or easily reassign tickets. Limited reporting executed with Structured Query Language (SQL) queries made it impossible for the IT team to manipulate data without technical assistance. Limited self-service capability and the inability to convert emails to tickets, which caused "significant frustrations."
"We were interested in a cloud solution to reduce upfront and ongoing administration costs. We wanted a new system that was easy to implement, customize, and had the flexibility to meet our requirements. We were also concerned about protecting PHI and remaining in HIPAA compliance so the new cloud help desk had to be HIPAA compliant and the vendor had to sign our Business Associates Agreement."
The Solution
Thanks to Giva's HIPAA compliant cloud IT help desk and "excellent workflow capability," Duhé reports significantly increased productivity in the IT department. "Since Giva is very intuitive to use, we have been able to leverage our hospital call center team (non technical personnel) as the level 1 IT help desk support team. This 24 x 7 call center team answers approximately 2.7 million calls per year. The ability to have standardized questions related to the call category automatically appear on the screen is helping us capture 60% more information in the initial phone call. Obtaining more accurate information from callers and proper ticket routing to appropriate teams has allowed us to decrease email and phone call follow-up by approximately 35%."
Athens Regional Health System was also pleased to report these additional benefits of switching to Giva:
- Increased to 90% achievement in meeting service level agreements
- 70% reduction in generating reports and admin; eliminated 35 hours/month
- 50% faster to create/assign a service request
- 60% increase in information captured during the initial phone call
- 50% increase in the number of service requests created due to intuitive design
"With Giva, there is no need for a 'reporting guru'. Our CIO or anybody can run reports without any technical assistance which was not possible in the past. We are also confident that the reporting metrics are more accurate and actionable as compared to our previous system."
For additional information, please see the full case study.
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