With the pandemic that rocked the world in 2020, a spotlight has been shone on healthcare systems and the challenges there are in running these institutions. Beyond the medical and research components, there are lots of supporting departments that are still needed to ensure hospitals and medical equipment are operating effectively. As medical administration has moved away from paper hardcopies and more towards virtual and online implements, many hospitals have picked up various tools and software along the way. While this can often get the job done, it also leaves gaps in efficiency where multiple tools need to be used in order to create a holistic picture. This aspect is where one client found themselves wanting a single software suite to tie everything together.
Our client is a healthcare system comprised primarily of a hospital, some physician groups, multiple facilities, and a surgery centre. They were using a combination of tools to track time logged against work, manage their projects, and run their helpdesk. In total, they needed more than 5 tools to accomplish their work. All of their processes were also manual, making them prone to error and inaccuracies. This setup made reporting a laborious process where data had to be gathered in one document in order to be presented as a report to their CIO. Given all of the manual effort required to manage their work, this client was seeking software that would be able to encompass all of these functionalities in one solution.
Using our customer portal to take requests in
At the heart of OneDesk’s suite of tools are the project management and helpdesk softwares. Although both offerings are very similar, our project management app allows tasks to be grouped and planned out, allowing dependencies to be identified and estimates to be tracked against the work. The smallest unit of work is a task, and this is where all of the relevant details about the work can be found. In contrast, our helpdesk software is focused around the concept of tickets, which can be brought into the OneDesk system via e-mail, manual input, or through our customer portal. These tickets also contain all of the same kinds of details as tasks do, including priority, description, time tracking, and any conversations. Most notably, our customer portal was highlighted by our client as an ideal way to bring requests into the system. To keep a hospital running effectively, there are many moving parts to consider. For example, a receptionist might experience issues with a printer and need help from the IT department to resolve it. The receptionist can then log their help request in the customer portal without directly signing in as a OneDesk user. By setting up a webform that the receptionist can fill it as a customer, our client’s IT department can ensure they receive all of the relevant details in order to start their work. Through the customer portal, the receptionist can track the issues they’ve logged and interact with whoever is working on fulfilling their requests, without having to sift through any internal details IT department is using to handle the work. Visibility on the customer portal can also be tuned so that customers – the receptionist in this instance – can view their own requests as well as their co-workers’, based on OneDesk’s concept of customer organizations.
Creating reports on any aspect of work
In the past, our client has had to manually pull data from different products in order to develop reports to share with their directors and colleagues. By using OneDesk for both their project management and helpdesk, our client is now able to run reports across work on any dimension. What allows them to do so are our custom fields and views. For any ticket type, custom fields can be defined to contain data as a separate attribute. This data can then be used for querying, filtering, and grouping when creating views. By default, we’ve defined a set of views that provide basic insights into work, but custom fields can be leveraged to boost the effectiveness of user-defined views. For example, our client has been manually creating documents outlining the work that’s been completed across their various projects. In OneDesk, this can be done easily by setting up a view that filters on the status of tasks and groups them by project or assignee. This view can then be turned into a report that can be shared with people externally.
Flexibility to tackle other functionality
By nature, OneDesk is designed to be an all-in-one project management and helpdesk solution. However, because of the flexibility of the OneDesk system, our applications can be adapted for uses beyond the ones we intended. For example, our client was especially interested in asset management and having some sort of way to track their hardware and equipment. By taking one of our existing apps, we can repurpose it for asset management. In addition to the project management and helpdesk apps, we also offer a product management application that can be easily be turned into an asset management tool. Because all of our apps work using the same basis of a hierarchy and grouping of work items, our customizability allows our apps to be used for all manner of management problems. In our administration options, we can create a ticket type to represent assets, and from there, define the workflow statuses that capture the different states of these assets. On top of that, custom fields can be used to capture all facets of the assets that would not make sense for project tasks or helpdesk tickets. With the ability to attach files to these asset tickets and view the history of a ticket’s activity, a pretty solid asset management system can be created within the OneDesk ecosystem.
By moving all project management, helpdesk, and asset management into OneDesk, our client is centralizing all of the information and data that is crucial to keeping their facilities up and running. Along with the web version of OneDesk, we also offer a mobile application that is available on both iOS and Android devices. Although some functionality is limited in our mobile offering, tickets and tasks can still be managed, and conversations can be quickly responded to on the fly. By using the OneDesk mobile app, our client can manage their projects and helpdesk requests from anywhere, and even receive notifications instantly when updates require their attention. Being in the healthcare industry, this can be critically important in helping medical staff stay on track and continue saving lives.