Val Verde Regional Medical Center

Citrix Troubleshooting & Proactive Citrix Monitoring Drops Support Tickets by 20%

You know what it’s like to be a part of a Healthcare IT operations team—between the seemingly endless support tickets, Citrix troubleshooting, resource constraints and demand to continually improve the quality of IT services, it’s a lot of pressure. Especially when budgets either stay the same or get slashed.

These are challenges facing most Healthcare IT CIOs. Once such CIO who faced these challenges is Val King, CIO of Val Verde Regional Medical Center (VVRMC). In spite of these challenges Val and his team dropped the overall number of support tickets by 20% and reduced the cost to resolve level 1 support tickets by 98% using Goliath’s automatic resolution and Citrix troubleshooting features.

When Val took over as CIO of VVRMC, his vision and mission became clear: improve patient care by ensuring that physicians and healthcare workers have the ability to seamlessly access vital applications, specifically McKesson Paragon—all while reducing costs.

It’s no small feat, but Val has a plan, which is a proactive approach to Citrix monitoring and managing his organization with and technology that are built for Citrix troubleshooting if the need arises. For Val, this means identifying IT operations challenges and getting ahead of them before they become serious problems.

Infrastructure

Citrix, VMware

 

Challenge

Reduce IT Support Costs & Improve Quality of Services Delivered

At the top of Val’s list of challenges was the ongoing cost of IT support and the quality of the IT services his team delivered to doctors and healthcare workers. He knew that in transitioning to digital systems there would be a constant increase in the number of projects, but the IT staff would remain capped.

Val knew that to achieve his goal he would need to decrease the frequency of performance issues with proactive Citrix monitoring and thereby reduce the number of support tickets and the cost to service those support tickets. In addition, since there are always performance issues at some point, having a comprehensive Citrix Troubleshooting tool. This would improve the experience of physicians, healthcare workers, and ultimately patients.

In implementing his plan to reduce costs, Val found significant obstacles in four key areas:

 

  1. The existing legacy IT infrastructure was not sufficient to support the delivery of McKesson applications to every user.
  2. A lack of any cohesive Citrix monitoring strategy that focused on improving.
  3. The need for a proactive technology that could act as an early warning system for the McKesson application that would let the team know there were issues, so they could fix them before end users were impacted. And, if there is an issue, a good Citrix troubleshooting tool.
  4. Finding a andMcKesson performance monitoring solution that was budget-friendly and didn’t require a lot of initial customization and ongoing support from a staff member or specialized consultants.

Solution

Steps to Success

The first step was to ensure that VVRMC had a solid IT infrastructure base that could support the number of end users who needed uninterrupted access to their applications. Val worked to gain the support of the hospital CEO and Board to upgrade the IT delivery infrastructure, including the network, and implementing Citrix to deliver McKesson applications to physicians and healthcare workers.

The second step was to establish a proactive Citrix monitoring strategy that focused on the end user experience with McKesson, while also incorporating information from CitrixVMware, and the supporting infrastructure. This would provide his team with visibility into all the elements, allowing the team to quickly isolate root cause and undertake real resolution actions.

This step proved especially difficult for Val and his team. Most products on the market are expensive, difficult to implement, and are architected for a different time when server and desktop virtualization didn’t exist. Most importantly, these products lack the ability to correlate Citrix end user experience, McKesson application performance data, and supporting infrastructure performance metrics, including VMware. This makes Citrix Troubleshooting practically impossible.

Eventually, Val found Goliath Technologies, which is purpose-built for proactive Citrix monitoring, analysis, reporting, troubleshooting and remediation and offers an application module for McKesson. Goliath’s software was able to bring together Citrix, Virtual Servers, such as VMware, End User Experience, McKesson, and existing legacy infrastructure into a single view—all at a price point that was lower than any alternative solution.

Results

By upgrading the infrastructure and implementing Goliath’s Proactive Citrix Performance Monitoring & Citrix Troubleshooting software, Val was able to both lower support ticket costs and improve access to applications.

Leveraging Goliath’s alerting functionality, support ticket volume dropped by 20%. Goliath’s software made this reduction in support tickets possible by proactively identifying problems and triggering alerts before end users were impacted.

The escalation costs of support tickets also dropped significantly. Level 1 support tickets normally cost $22 at VVRMC, but with Goliath’s automated fix actions, the software can fix the problem without having to get a person involved. This led to the cost of a Level 1 ticket dropping to only 50 cents, which is a 98% cost reduction.

Of course, these reductions, while positive, are ultimately second to the actual experience of the physicians and healthcare workers that rely on Val and his team. After implementing his Proactive approach to IT Operations and deploying Goliath’s Citrix monitoring software, an internal survey found that the team’s Quality of Service Rating among end users improved by 17%, leading to an overall approval rating of 93%.

Even with all these positive outcomes, Val admits that there is still work to be done. However, he and his team know they are on the right track and are confident that when a physician or healthcare worker is meeting with a patient that they will be able to access the applications they need to deliver the best patient care possible.

If you would like to learn more about Val’s proactive approach to managing IT Operations, view a recording of his CIO Insight Webinar

Chris Hughes

ABOUT VVRMC

Val Verde Regional Medical Center is a healthcare facility located in Del Rio, Texas, providing a range of medical services to the community. Known for its commitment to quality patient care, the center offers comprehensive healthcare solutions, including emergency services, diagnostics, and specialized medical treatments.

Headquarters location: Texas, United States
Founded: 1959
Employees: >700
Industry: Healthcare