Moorfields adopts ITIL and consolidates three service desks with Hornbill's Supportworks ITSM

Moorfields is one of the world's leading eye hospitals, providing expertise in clinical care, research and teaching and education.

It implemented Hornbill's Supportworks ITSM service management software to provide support to over 1,200 clinical and administrative staff across 11 sites. Since going live summer 2009, the IT services team has benefited from consolidation of its three service desks to one.

The service team provides support for all IT, administration and clinical systems used in its locations across London. Moorfields selected Hornbill's for its ease of use and compatibility with ITIL processes. The IT service team claims improved service levels and better use of resources since adopting ITIL best practice for Incident and Problem management using Supportworks.

Barrie Winnard, Moorfields' IT Manager, said: 'We wanted to adopt ITIL best practice as well as streamline our service desks to provide a unified support service. Following a lengthy evaluation process, Hornbill's Supportworks ITSM stood out from the competition – it supported ITIL, was user friendly and fitted our price range.

'With our newly centralised service desk, we can keep track of the requests that we have each day and evaluate the types of calls, working more efficiently as a team. Using Supportworks has encouraged us to adopt ITIL for our support processes. Our next step is to introduce self service, which will release our agents' time for more constructive activities.'

18 staff in the IT service team use Supportworks' IT service management software, including first, second and third line support, providing support to doctors, nurses and administration staff. The team analyses the length, type and volume of all calls, to identify peaks in demand and the best application of resources.

In addition it plans to populate the knowledgebase with frequently asked questions and answers and to direct staff towards self help. The improved call information has also helped the IT team to resolve more calls remotely, saving staff time by reducing the need for external site visits.

Gerry Sweeney, CEO of Hornbill Systems, said: 'Any organisation using disparate support systems to manage incidents, will find it difficult to know where best to focus resources. Consolidating services into a single desk not only assists an IT department to streamline calls, it can also help to capture important call data that can be used for planning.

Supportworks has been designed to not only provide a single repository for call data, it can help service desks to automate many processes, adopt ITIL best practice and deploy resource more efficiently.'

Its main focus is the treatment and care of NHS patients with a wide range of eye problems, from common complaints to rare conditions, which require treatments not available anywhere else in the UK.

It treats people at the main hospital base in London's City Road and at
12 other sites in and around the capital.

It is also a postgraduate teaching centre and a national centre for ophthalmic research involving, with the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, the largest ophthalmic research programme in the world. In addition, Moorfields manages three commercial divisions - Moorfields Private, Moorfields Pharmaceuticals and Moorfields Eye Hospital Dubai.