Healthcare is inundated with information (and a lot of it is sensitive information). Tasking one or a couple of IT staff to oversee everything can often be an overwhelming task. The problem is that even when outsourcing many healthcare IT roles to other vendors, it’s hard to know what goes on behind the scenes and whether your vendors are doing what they say they are.
Today I want to walk you through some of the reasons why having reliable IT support can make or break your hospital and why it’s a headache to manage IT in a healthcare environment.
IT Mismanagement
More often than I’d like to admit, IT responsibilities become muddled and mismanaged and that’s not to blame IT staff. The problem with hospitals is IT infrastructure is really complicated. And without someone who’s primary responsibility is to oversee that everything is working and managing all of the nuts and bolts with the bigger picture of your organization in mind—IT will likely fail to deliver what your hospital needs. Management skills are an entirely different skill set than simply having IT chops (to be frank: most IT guys are NOT project managers and have no passion to manage their time—they’d much rather invest their time purely in tech).
Network Outages
When technology isn’t tracked or is lost in the day to day, outages are imminent. Because most IT experts are often focused on fighting fires and working on daily issues, they miss sight of the bigger more critical infrastructure in your network’s environment. More often than I’d like to admit, updates have been missed across all healthcare (this is NOT just an issue plaguing rural health), and infrastructure gets overlooked. The eventual result is consistently outages. Whether a messy server room or a dying piece of hardware—the ultimate result is the same. A downed network means radiology cannot send images, billing cannot process, charges do not get tracked timely, pharmacy not able to print labels and manage prescriptions. To you this is probably unacceptable!
Lack of interoperability
The unfortunate residual effect of digitization is that systems are not compatible. You’ve probably seen this first hand. Different vendors do not work well together. Your systems are in constant disarray—and your users have chronic issues getting even basic functionality (like printing) to work right.
The nature of technology is inherently buggy. Most software designers don’t consider how their software is used, how many clicks different operations take and how hard basic functions are to implement in real world environments. If your IT is not proactively evaluating vendor issues and devising solutions—or than simply quick fixes to problems—your hospital is likely wasting large amounts of time and money tolerating problems that shouldn’t be so.
Growing costs of compliance, maintenance and functionality
Costs associated with keeping HIPAA compliant, making sure that basic maintenance and security are in place on your network while keeping functionality for staff has gotten too complicated for most IT support teams to handle. Not only must your organization pay for hardware and software, it also needs to invest in considerable expenses setting up, maintaining, and training your team. For many rural and critical access hospitals those costs are prohibitive to continue long term (but keep reading—I’ve got a plan on how to get quality IT support without costing an arm and a leg).
Limited documentation
Even though digitization was meant to ensure documentation work better for providers and patients, alike, many have found new documentation problems in the age of technology. Principally IT support teams need to work on your network and set it up in very particular ways. The problem with tweaking the system is that if left undocumented or under-explained, your already complicated network may shut down and no one would have a clue (we have actually had to clean up networks with a fine tooth comb to figure out exactly what a technician had changed to cause a complete hospital-wide outage (true story—the hospital was down for 4 days, resorting completely to paper!).
Continuous need for updating systems
The never ending saga in IT is system updates and maintenance. Without focus on continuously updating your hospital network, you leave yourself vulnerable to cyberattacks, software compatibility issues, bugs and outages. The problem with keeping up with updates? Update releases have gotten more persistent since the rise in cybercrime. Without keeping track of updates and confirming that they actually were applied correctly and that your network is stronger with them, you may likely remain vulnerable to either chronic computer issues long term or vulnerable systems.
Slowing productivity
When systems are implemented poorly, doctors and nurses suffer. They get inundated with computer issues and changes, resulting in less focused attention on patient care (or even retention of your best doctors). When systems fail to run smoothly—either because they are ill-maintained or because they were not implemented correctly, your staff suffer. While IT support teams may devise work arounds, if they lack the particular experience or expertise related to the issue (or are simply relying on vendors to solve their own problems—not a very speedy or easy feat), you’re likely jeopardizing productivity.
The problem with IT? When done wrong, things can get real ugly. And many times, you don’t know what went wrong until after disaster strikes.
Are you confident in your network (no outages, no productivity lag, no costly fixes, no compliance concerns)? Contact us TODAY for a free roadmap meeting.
