To continue the transition in information technology support announced earlier this year, effective Oct. 1, Dell will provide Help Desk and clinical workstation support at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
VUMC faculty and staff will continue to call the Help Desk at 343-HELP for all IT-related questions. Faculty and staff who currently submit tickets for IT assistance to Pegasus, the Vanderbilt IT service management tool, will continue to do so. If the problem requires hands-on assistance, a technician will be dispatched. IT support will continue to be provided 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“[lquote]We anticipate this change will be seamless for end users,”[/lquote] John F. Manning Jr., associate vice chancellor for health affairs and chief administrative officer, said. “Based on our experience thus far with Dell, we anticipate a very high level of support, delivered in a consistent, sustainable manner across our organization.”
A new team, the Clinical Application Support Team (CAST), has been created to provide focused support for enterprise clinical applications such as StarPanel, AdminRx and others. This team will be staffed by Vanderbilt IT employees and will allow clinicians to resolve critical application issues as quickly as possible. The team is currently undergoing training and will also go live Oct. 1. Faculty and staff will access CAST by calling the Help Desk at 343-HELP.
“We worked with Vanderbilt IT to create CAST to ensure the clinical applications that are critical to patient care—and that differentiate our clinical services from those of our peers—continue to receive focused support at Vanderbilt from Vanderbilt employees,” Manning said.
The Dell team assigned to Vanderbilt is located in Nashville, has a substantial presence at medical center locations, will be dedicated to serving Vanderbilt, and will include former Vanderbilt IT employees.
“We’re looking forward to having Dell on the ground and leveraging their successful experience serving academic medical center clients like VUMC,” said John M. Lutz, vice chancellor for information technology. “We’re especially gratified that many of our former teammates accepted positions at Dell and will continue to use their expertise and institutional knowledge to support the medical center.”
Support of department-specific or highly specialized clinical applications will continue to be provided by Vanderbilt employees with application expertise. These employees will be part of Health Informatics Technologies and Services (HITS).
