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Sidekick: IT Director Support

For Hospital IT Administrators, Day To Day Overrules Best Practices.

We know that every IT support team would love to get everything done, but day to day takes precedent to getting other important—but seemingly less pressing—issues resolved.

The bottom line: your IT department doesn’t want to decide what they need to give up simply because they don’t have the resources. They want the best for the hospital and its patients. They don’t want to settle.

8 components of IT that most hospital IT departments really want to outsource:

  1. On-demand expertise when it’s needed — having expertise in areas that your IT staff is not knowledgeable or well-equipped to handle helps you deal with addressing any ‘what ifs’ before they become emergencies. Getting needed project work expertly addressed by subject experts (email migrations, EHR implementation work, etc) is invaluable to ensuring quick resolution to chronic issues.
  2. Getting the right security solutions — having security expertise and the assurance that your IT guy won’t need to be at his phone on call 24/7 makes a big difference in having internal support teams that have the capacity to support your hospital network. Wouldn’t you like to get live access to health IT engineers 24 x 7? American-based, English-speaking help desk support around the clock? Most rural hospitals would at minimum look forward to having live access to an engineer 24 x 7 (more than just having a call service answering calls. Having resolutions on the phone live).
  3. Getting HIPAA security policies and procedures implemented — I’m sure your IT team has struggled with figuring out how to create and implement HIPAA compliance policies across your network. Why not have some help writing and reviewing HIPAA security policy and procedures? Internal teams don’t have the time or bandwidth to do extra homework figuring out what the latest policies are and writing out procedures (some of which change too frequently to keep track). Having a security team monitor and evaluate what needs to be done can be a lifesaver for your internal team.
  4. Vendor Management — tracking vendors and making sure they are compliant is extremely painful, especially when it comes to making sure you are covering your bases when it comes to mitigating your hospital’s risk and responsibilities with patient data that moves outside of your network. Do you have time keeping track of your BAAs? What about risk management? Compliance seems to be more of a pain than it should be. Compliance is a pain point for everyone. HIPAA HITECH the meetings / the version changes the BAAs and the risk management.
  5. Testing backups — when was the last time you tested your backups or restore process? If you were hit with ransomware, would you be able to quickly go back to running relatively normal operations? Backups and restore testing would be something we would consider outsourcing. Testing your backups onsite and off is critical to your continuity in a disaster situation. But far too often, the day to day gets in between internal teams from putting backups on the top of their To Do list.
  6. Network Monitoring — do you know what’s going on your network? What traffic is actually hitting your network? Are there bad guys trying to get in or data leaking out? Most IT departments don’t have the bandwidth after a full day of maintenance or help desk support to even think about generating a report and keying in on the important data. Firewall and network management. We have rules that auto apply and auto block. Threat detection is in place. A report of what is going on and mitigation is increasingly helpful as cyber threats and attacks continue to rise.
  7. Patching — patches are often hard to keep track of. Even when they are automated, testing and making sure updates and patches work in your environment can take hours. And troubleshooting critical patches if they aren’t working with your critical software may require additional troubleshooting. Many internal departments see value in passing the baton on patches so that they can focus more on day to day operations.
  8. Manage your reimage — often the easiest way to manage computers in an environment as complicated as a rural hospital is to maintain an image of all the software and configurations you need to operate efficiently and stay compliant. Configurations go a long way to keep your hospital secure and without proper management of your image, you may lack consistency across users on your network (making day to day support harder for your internal team) and may jeopardize your IT security by having variations of configurations that lead to loopholes in security measures, ultimately risking access to critical and sensitive data by cyber criminals and hackers. Many hospitals rely on outsourced hospital IT partners to help them consistently maintain an image across the entire network that minimizes downtime and continues to keep staff and patients secure.

Three visible changes across your organization from augmenting your IT support:

  1. Lower costs — many rural and critical access hospital IT budgets require compromises. Maybe you defer maintenance on your servers or replacement of equipment because you simply don’t have the funds right now. When outsourcing labor to health-centered outsourced support solution, typically hospitals realize 30-60% cost reductions, while retaining expertise—often in more areas than simply with internal staff.
  2. Avoid critical mistakes — because outsourced solutions are made up of large teams — focused on healthcare technology—they often identify and avoid more mistakes than internal teams. By having multiple checks and accountabilities, outsourced health IT often are able to avoid critical mistakes—some of which may lead to outages, security vulnerabilities or fines — than if you simply had a small team.
  3. 24/7 workforce — you’d be hard pressed to find a hospital IT department with staff on hand all day and all night. Likely, IT may be on call (having to respond to issues within an hour), but the likelihood of IT successfully answering calls 24/7 is slim.

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