EHR Health IT Service Desk FAQs

By MacKenzie Gonnelly

The EHR help desk is a vital function, serving as the frontlines of a hospital's IT department — as a view into clinician, support staff, and patient EHR issues. Poor support and delayed ticket resolution can cause a negative ripple effect onto physician satisfaction, EHR utilization, operational efficiency, and patient care coordination. To strategically assess your help desk support options, consider these top four questions to ask vendors when evaluating how to cost-effectively support a meaningful EHR service desk.

1. What is the value-add of supplemental service desk support?
   By supplementing support for service desk operations, Hospital leaders can enable internal IT teams to focus on high-priority projects or mission critical IT initiatives. This approach not only eases daily operational support burden but also reduces the cost associated with utilizing higher-priced internal resources on tier 1 support. Utilizing supplemental EHR help desk support can improve internal IT staff satisfaction, allowing team members to operate at their highest level of license or certification ¬– demonstrating greater productivity and value.
   
   Supplemental help desk support can also boost end-user support efficiency by minimizing EHR support backlog, reducing re-occurring end-user errors, and diminishing ticket escalations. Seek support vendors — like Stoltenberg Consulting — who prioritize first-contact resolution SLA improvement, ultimately increasing direct patient care time.
   
   
2. What is the impact of an EHR service desk on the end-user experience?
   Since the help desk is the face of the IT department, if an end-user call doesn't receive timely, meaningful and empathetic communication from an EHR expert, EHR burden builds, clinician burnout continues, and support for IT initiatives may dwindle.
   
   It is important to pursue a focus on full resolution within a service desk. Seek service desk partnerships that provide clinically consultative EHR-centric service desk, focused on elevating the end-user experience and effectively supporting clinicians — even at a tier 1 level. Ensure service desk agents are EHR-certified, understand clinical jargon and hospital workflow, and lead with a customer service focus.
   
   Additionally, inquire whether vendors offer clinician-specific EHR support services to further enhance end-user satisfaction. For example, Stoltenberg offers several provider-focused solutions, including the Physician Concierge Line for priority response and 1:1 custom Provider Sessions, addressing individualized EHR issues, education gaps, preference lists, or customization requests. By prioritizing end-user satisfaction in service desk selection, healthcare organizations can transform a ticket-taking help desk into a true support desk.
   
   
3. Can health system service desk support be customized?
   When considering additional service desk support, examine a vendor's complete range of customization options. First, healthcare organizations should be able to opt into EHR-only support, desktop and technical support, patient portal end-user support, or remote access support — or all these services at once. As organizations evolve or add additional applications or security measures, support partners must be able to flex to support these changes. Customization offerings should also extend to time-of-day needs. This may include 24/7x365 support or after-hours only support, when the internal team isn't staffed either due to a limited local talent pool or significantly increased costs. Ideally, a service desk vendor should offer a fully customizable support solution to meet a healthcare organization's specific needs.
   
   Prioritize an agile service desk partnership, who can deliver real-time flexibility to ramp up and adjust staffing on an immediate basis. Effective partners take a proactive resource approach, eliminating workforce hurdles by staffing for demand based on evolving call volume trends during project or operational fluctuations. Ensure external resources have the scalability to seamlessly absorb support for new version upgrades, M&A alignment, or new facility training for continuity across all end-user groups, departments, and locations.
   
   
4. What are best practices for integrating supplemental service desk resources into internal IT operations?
   All outsourced resources should be capable of becoming an extension of the internal IT department, to the point where end users cannot tell the difference between internal or external support quality. This requires aligning with vendors, like Stoltenberg Consulting, who can deliver clinically consultative EHR support analysts for meaningful knowledge transfer.
   
   Moreover, it is important to understand that internal IT teams often take pride in supporting hospital staff and may feel threatened by external support — especially if collaboration is lacking. Ensure IT staff understand that utilizing a blended support framework ultimately benefits their team by minimizing a support burden and granting individuals peace of mind to focus time on alternative IT projects or advancing their skillsets. Tactics like creating and optimizing knowledge base (KBA) articles and how-to instruction sets can help facilitate collaboration between service desk agents and internal IT staff.
   
   

Consider these EHR service desk FAQs when evaluating how to enhance your healthcare organization's end-user support via a strategic service desk solution — whether selecting a fully outsourced or a partially outsourced model. By combining proven best practice approaches with expert resources, a partnership with Stoltenberg Consulting can help your team overcome EHR support strain to align technology support strategy with your competitive growth roadmap.