Healthcare Case Study

Healthcare Industry

The healthcare industry is always being asked to do more with less.  Hospitals, clinics and providers require efficient room and resource scheduling solutions that help reduce costs and maximize productivity. Resources might include traditional conference room equipment such as white boards and LCD displays as well as more sensitive, high value equipment such as medical instruments and lab equipment.

A resource and room scheduling solution to book conference rooms and equipment have traditionally been done using pen and paper or manually. This method requires inefficient double entry and in many cases, causes confusion if a reservation is moved or canceled. By consolidating the scheduling processes in a simple and easy to use interface within Microsoft Outlook, healthcare organization experience measurable end user productivity improvements and cost reductions.

MeetingPlanner from EmergingSoft provides a single solution for room, equipment and service reservations in addition to food services, video conferencing and facilities set up scheduling.

Situation

A large North American healthcare provider utilized multiple tools to manage events, room schedules and equipment reservations. The help desk was overrun with multiple calls to schedule these event or resource.  A central team was required for room scheduling, food services orders, equipment reservations and room set up. In some instances, a single meeting required (4) calls to the help desk.  In addition, facilities, IT and food services resources were not always aware of a meeting time or venue change, creating support inefficiency and waste.

Solution

• MeetingPlanner was picked as the optimal single source solution to meet the business and technology requirements for the organization.
• The easy to use MeetingPlanner integration with Microsoft Outlook was deployed to every individual desktop.
• Features such as equipment and room reservations, food services and facilities requests were deployed out of the box to support the organizations requirements.
• Eliminated the need to use multiple systems to schedule rooms, equipment, teleconferences, catering or AV.
• Extensive reporting was made available for room and resource utilization.
• Migrated data from an existing stand alone help desk application into the MeetingPlanner database to ensure historical reservation data was maintained.

Benefits

• Drastically decreased calls to the help desk and facilities.
• Eliminated double booking and resource conflicts.
• Provided a single solution for work flow calendar views for food services and facilities.
• Eliminated reliance on Exchange Administrators for room and resource adjustments, adds and deletes.
• Freed up the conference management staff from booking rooms so they could to focus on event planning, support and room management.