“ WE HAVE GREAT WORKING RELATIONSHIPS WITH OUR TECHNOLOGY PARTNERS ; WE OPERATE WITH THEM AS TRUE PARTNERS , NOT JUST VENDORS ”
UPSTREAM REHABILITATION
“ WE HAVE GREAT WORKING RELATIONSHIPS WITH OUR TECHNOLOGY PARTNERS ; WE OPERATE WITH THEM AS TRUE PARTNERS , NOT JUST VENDORS ”
JEFF PETET VICE PRESIDENT OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY , UPSTREAM REHABILITATION
in managing service desks for other large organizations and the great customer service they could deliver .
Petet made the decision in mid-2019 to outsource his Tier 1 Service Desk team to MCA and describes it as one of the best decisions in his tenure at Upstream . “ We saw immediate improvements across the board on our Service Desk metrics ,” says Petet . “ Again , our clinicians and back-office associates may not even be aware that we have outsourced our Tier 1 because we treat them as Upstream associates , and they represent themselves as Upstream associates . It has truly been a great partnership .”
Cybersecurity a challenge as healthcare industry targeted Petet says he faces many challenges in his role , but a number of them loom large each day – including staffing issues (“ Find the right people at the right time ,” is his mantra ) and interoperability when working with both partners and third-party service providers . “ We ' re doing a lot of joint ventures , so we have to ensure that our systems can integrate with each other ,” he explains .
The ongoing digital transformation of the business also keeps his team very busy . “ We ’ re using technology to optimise processes for our associates , so they can better serve our patients ,” says Petet . “ And , unfortunately , cybersecurity is a challenge due to healthcare continuing to be the target of bad actors . Cybersecurity – and information security in general – is very important to me .”
Petet continues : “ I ' m always here to be a proponent for the information security field , especially in healthcare , because we need to keep our systems online ”
Technology is embedded throughout the Upstream ecosystem of companies , explains Petet , thus producing a large amount of internal and external data sets . “ And the integration of that data allows us to see how we ' re doing compared to our appearance in the industry , how our patients feel , and how we ' re doing against our internally-set benchmarks ,” he says .
“ Having this data available in near-realtime allows our leaders to make quick data-driven decisions that support and improve the patient experience , while also previewing a clinician experience with better outcomes for our patients at lower costs .
“ When it comes to digital transformation , we ’ re using technology not just to modernise existing processes , but also to revamp the processes . It ' s all people-process technology , so you ' re using technology to automate things where you can ,” says Petet . “ And that ' s one of the things that we want to do : we want our clinicians to operate at top of licence by automating as much as possible .”
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