The Client
Piedmont Healthcare, a private, not-for-profit organization serving nearly two million patients across Georgia, is transforming healthcare, creating a destination known for the best clinicians and a one-of-a-kind experience that always puts patients first. Today, more than 110 years since it was founded, Piedmont is known as a leading health system in cancer care, treatment of heart disease, and organ transplantation. The system is comprised of 11 hospitals, 34 urgent care centers, 25 Piedmont QuickCare locations, 555 Piedmont Clinic physician practice locations, and more than 2,500 Piedmont Clinic members . Piedmont is dedicated to making a positive difference by bettering the health and well-being of the people in the communities they serve.
“Like all enterprises today, our employees rely on a variety of applications in the course of any given business day to achieve their goals. For years, CTG has provided the support and expertise needed to fully maintain and manage our application portfolio so that we can focus on the imaging innovations our clients and consumers demand.” - Chief Information Officer
Challenge
In order to remain competitive and meet the needs of Georgia’s patient population, Piedmont Healthcare set the strategic goal of building a statewide network while continuously improving patient quality, safety, and the overall patient experience. Over the last several years, many hospitals and physician practices across the state have been integrated into the Piedmont Healthcare
system in support of this goal.
This rapid organizational expansion required the quick consolidation of information systems, including Piedmont’s Epic electronic medical record (EMR), to ensure consistency in patient care workflows, documentation, and coding. Creating an EMR standard across the organization was necessary to achieve accurate reporting of patient care activities system-wide for both internal and external needs. Thus, Piedmont’s internal Epic team was faced with managing the balance between their responsibilities to implement, optimize, and sustain.
Solution
Piedmont partnered with CTG to address their Epic support needs, allowing Piedmont’s staff to focus on implementation and optimization projects without
sacrificing user satisfaction. The CTG team implemented our Application and IT Support solution, designed to maximize the value, efficiency, and cost effectiveness of application management.
CTG’s experienced Tier 2 application support team seamlessly integrated with Piedmont’s internal Epic staff, and within two to three weeks, assumed delivery responsibility. CTG provided support for most Epic modules and functions, and a variety of Radiology/PACS applications. Our support included handling break-fix tickets in addition to service requests, routine maintenance, and tasks such as queue monitoring, SER build, and build activities. The team’s goal was to resolve all incidents according to service-level agreements.
Results
Through our Application and IT Support solution, the CTG team provided top-notch Tier 2 Epic application support to Piedmont while offering the flexibility to scale
the size of support teams to reliably and cost effectively meet their ongoing application support needs.
The support that the team provided allowed Piedmont’s internal resources to address net new Epic build requirements, enabling the organization to meet implementation commitments in support of its strategic goal—creating a statewide health network.
CTG quickly became a trusted partner to Piedmont’s internal Epic teams and end users by providing reliable, timely issue resolution and communication, helping enhance overall user experience.
Highlights include:
- Routinely meeting or exceeding the target to resolve 70% or more of all incidents for CTG-supported modules
- Consistently meeting Piedmont IT Leadership’s target of 5% or less for breached tickets
- Using CTG’s remote support model to save Piedmont the costs traditionally associated with traveling outside consultants
“We have used CTG on two occasions to provide application support services. Their transition model is effective and knowledge transfer was completed in two to three weeks on both projects. This saved dollars and provided quick relief to the Piedmont analysts. The CTG model of focusing resources on support tasks has demonstrated efficiencies that we are taking into consideration for the Piedmont team structure.”
—Alan Bowen, Executive Director, EMR, Piedmont Healthcare