Ever since the digitization of patient health information (PHI), the effectiveness of IT solutions in healthcare organizations has markedly increased the quality of patient care. Today, the ability to serve the needs of patients depends heavily on the accessibility to and integrity of the data available to healthcare providers. However, there’s a risk with every operational change, which explains the overwhelming challenges today’s healthcare leaders face.
Often strapped for cash and struggling to overcome the limitations of in-house IT, healthcare providers are now turning to managed services for their technology needs. Partnering with a managed IT services provider (MSP) gives opportunities to leverage technology to its fullest potential while overcoming key challenges like scalability, mobility, and compliance. Here are five ways your company can benefit from a reliable MSP:
1. Overcome compliance challenges
Healthcare providers operate within one of the most highly regulated sectors of all. However, running regular compliance audits and meeting other legal obligations, such as user access management, data encryption, and security awareness training, can become a collectively enormous undertaking.
Healthcare practices often find it difficult to keep up, particularly when they want to implement newer technologies to improve productivity and patient care. Fortunately, an MSP with experience in the healthcare field can take care of compliance matters for you.
2. Improve patient care
Technology can either make or break a healthcare practice. If your computers are outdated and inefficient, they’ll likely be unreliable and unsecure, and that can compromise patient care.
By contrast, the right technology environment can increase and improve engagement between employees and their patients while optimizing internal processes. This ensures a tangible, positive impact on patient satisfaction. By providing access to the most suitable technologies and expertise for your practice, an MSP can help you improve patient care enormously.
3. Enable workforce mobility
Mobile technologies introduce both immense opportunity and terrifying risks to the healthcare space. For example, having PHI stored on mobile devices greatly increases the chances of a data breach.
At the same time, workforce mobility has become a key enabler of engagement with patients while offering increased satisfaction to employees and lowering the costs of office space and in-house infrastructure. By migrating to a cloud-based infrastructure overseen by an experienced MSP, practices can enjoy all the benefits of anywhere-accessibility while also keeping the risks at bay.
4. Build a scalable infrastructure
A practice needs a scalable operational infrastructure to take in more patients to take care of and more staff to train. By contrast, technology that doesn’t scale with demand ends up being a barrier to growth and continuous improvement of patient care. Aging in-house data centers, limited physical space, and strained budgets are common examples of technology with little or no scalability.
Partnering with an MSP can help overcome these limitations by building a software-defined, cloud-hosted infrastructure that will grow with your practice. For example, simply adding a new user account for your core systems is a lot cheaper than investing in a new workstation.
5. Regain control over IT costs
Hardware like servers, workstations, and storage-area networks are high capital expenses that also need ongoing maintenance and regular upgrades. Moreover, if something goes wrong, the cost of unscheduled downtime can cripple an organization, as the UK’s NHS found out in 2017 with the global WannaCry ransomware attack.
However, operationalizing your IT through managed services provides complete visibility into costs. It also comes with proactive care to the extent that unscheduled downtime becomes a thing of the past, and things like hardware upgrades are no longer a concern.
ZENOPS helps healthcare providers streamline operational processes, improve profitability, and regain control over security and compliance. Call us today to get started.
