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Services: IT Consulting
Business Need
A Changing Industry
Pagosa Springs Medical Center includes a rural hospital, emergency department, acute care trained emergency medical service (2014 EMS service of the year), and primary care center. Located in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, the medical center campus also offers lab, pharmacy, radiology, and telemedicine technology. The hospital Board of Directors, staff, and physicians work together to provide excellent, personalized care to all residents and visitors regardless of ability to pay.
That’s What We Need!
Kyle Kellum, Chief Operating Officer at Pagosa Springs Medical Center (PSMC) first encountered Synoptek while having lunch at a healthcare conference with a fellow healthcare COO at a similar facility who was talking to another gentleman. He heard them talking very animatedly, and very positively, about IT practices at their facility. As he listened, he realized that their IT struggles had been the same as his own, and they no longer had them!
Joining into the conversation he learned that the other gentleman was Martin Gossen from Synoptek, who pointed him in the right directions regarding the problems they had, showing how Synoptek had worked with the other facility to solve them.
All agreed that the biggest challenge they had was end-user satisfaction. Users were forced to navigate between multiple different servers and had constant maintenance issues. There was equipment they knew they needed to purchase but weren’t sure which selections were right for them. Worst of all, end users were having many challenges that just weren’t being resolved.
PSMC was in the midst of a lengthy process of selecting an IT services provider. Adding Synoptek to two other providers on their ‘short list’, Kellum realized that the selection ultimately came down to which one he felt users would benefit from the most, and what would put PSMC in the best possible compliance position with the best support. After extensive vetting, Kellum happily reports, “In the end it was definitely Synoptek.”
End users were having many challenges that just weren’t being resolved.
Solution and Approach
Prior to engaging Synoptek, PSMC had three IT people performing fundamental “break/fix” repairs. Standard operating procedure was not much more than ‘go to this person for everything you need.’ The result was long delays in resolving many issues. “Then came a huge paradigm shift for our users,” explains Kellum, “a big uphill challenge at first for all of them.” The shift was from the previous ‘tap on the shoulder’ method of requesting services to a consistent process in which users would simply send an email which would log a service request ticket that could be tracked from beginning to end.
While this change concerned many of the users, as soon as they realized that their service requests were being resolved quickly and they had a meaningful update within a short timeframe, their fears dissolved.
“Since Synoptek was taking over our entire IT function, it took time to plan how we would onboard,” says Kellum. “Once we had a plan as to how we would onboard, the support was there and our end users reaped the benefits immediately. Turnaround on tickets was rapid. Where some had been open for months, now they were closed in hours or a day or so.” “It’s interesting to note,” he adds, “that the number of tickets actually increased due to quick resolution and the trust factor to resolve.”
Business Results
Explains Kellum, “Synoptek is managing our servers, doing our help desk function. They developed and implemented our phone system organization-wide. They are essentially our IT for the organization. We run everything through them, from purchases to strategic planning. We’re having regular conversations with our Synoptek Virtual CIO, regarding the $12 million clinic facility, which will soon be open.”
“Things are being unearthed by Synoptek’s people that we didn’t know were a challenge. They’re involved in everything from build to management, patching, updates, Synoptek takes care of it all for us.”
We run everything through them, from purchases to strategic planning.