Doug Martin: Variety of Support Models

As Carilion Clinic has continued to move forward on securing and supporting medical devices with our standardized model, we also have identified an issue we should have addressed as part of the process. Medical devices stem from different service lines and different facilities. The scope of use, the level of complexity at administering the system, and historic ownership result in a variety of support models for different systems with medical devices.

While Carilion Clinic has a standard model to support the workstation, there is no standard model on how end-user-administered systems are administered and how those system administrators respond to service requests and interface with our Technology Services Group (TSG) department. This creates more of a challenge when we identify a clinical device that has been flagged by our enterprise management systems with an issue and we need system administrator assistance to get the device. An additional future step from our original article (published in the fall 2011 issue of Horizons) is to identify an ideal support model for how TSG interfaces with system administrators outside of our department to work and resolve issues with their system’s devices. We anticipate this will be more daunting than standardizing the support at the device level and would appreciate feedback from peers that have tackled this opportunity.