Assessing the impact of change in the organization of a technical support system for a health information systems (HIS).

Objective: Evaluate the impact of the implementation of a new model of Help Desk and technical support in HIS users of the hospital. We carried an anonymous survey on a random sample of 150 users of the new system. The administrative staff (A), doctors (D) and nurses (N) were analysed by strata. We assessed the accessibility both to phone calls and through the institutional intranet; the understanding of the problems; the time taken to fully answer requests; and the degree of satisfaction concerning the change. The results showed that 94%, gained access through the intranet and that it was very satisfactory for the medical group (D80% vs A34% vs N8.7%). The different kinds of users were satisfied with the response time, above all the administrative stratum (A42% vs D38% vs N14%). All of them commented on their satisfaction with the change, above all, the doctors (D68% vs A46% vs N22%), who before this new implementation had expressed dissatisfaction with the old system.

Conclusions: operational changes in the Help Desk contributed to improve how the service was perceived by its users; nevertheless both doctors and nurses required even faster response time.