There are few places in the world where work is a matter of life or death. Sparrow Hospital is one of those few, as mid-Michigan’s premier healthcare provider. Working at a hospital requires quick decision making. With the medical world’s ever increasing dependence on technology, Sparrow’s IT personnel must resolve technical issues as soon as possible. To complete tasks quicker for Sparrow’s IT department, we developed an innovative web system called iSupport Center. This integrated dashboard contains tools that employees use to their advantage.

One tool of iSupport Center is to notify employees of incidents. The dashboard screen organizes these open incidents by level of urgency. More details on each assignment can be viewed with one click. Sparrow employees contacted the IT Helpdesk over 60,000 times last year. Finding the necessary information to support one of Sparrow’s 400 applications can be overwhelming. iSupport Center includes a search bar to quickly find the application support page. An alert notification can then immediately be sent to the on-call team from the tool.

To show available hardware such as printers and fax machines, iSupport Center includes a dynamic floor plan and hardware map. If any hardware fails, it is indicated on the map with a red marker as opposed to a green marker. Helpdesk support can then redirect employees to the nearest working machine.

The iSupport Center is accessed via any web browser, developed in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and ASP.NET/C#, with data management in Microsoft SQL Server 2008.