How medical IT staff can manage the challenge of digitalized healthcare

Healthcare technology is evolving like never before, transforming life-enhancing possibilities into reality every day by harnessing the powers of AI, digital record-keeping, Big Data and the cloud. To manage this full-scale digitalization, healthcare IT departments are becoming more central to patient care.

Yet a shortage of medical professionals has made IT hiring in healthcare a challenge overall. Can healthcare IT greet the promise of the digital age, without a sizable boosting of staff? 

The hiring challenges experienced across many healthcare practices have trickled down to IT. Small staff are tasked to manage new and expanding areas of critical concern, like telehealth, electronic health records (EHR) and the collection of wearable device data to monitor such things as heart rates and glucose levels.

So, what can healthcare CTOs and CIOs do to not let their human resource challenges drain opportunities to better serve patients? One way to ease the strain is to develop your IT efforts around these four Ps: Prioritize, Protect, Personalize and Partner.

Prioritize

With so many items on a healthcare IT director’s to-do list, the first thing required is focus. IT leaders must prioritize their people in those places where they can have the greatest impact.

Where does the value of your enterprise lie? Which initiatives require the most IT support? Are there easy lifts that can be managed quickly? Conversely, are there more complex tasks that require substantive planning before action is taken?

Every IT manager, regardless of their staffing levels, faces many tough decisions. What are the most critical challenges facing your organization? How can a small pool of resources be deployed most effectively? What strategy will enjoy the greatest support across the enterprise?

One system for doing this is to establish criteria for prioritizing work that needs to be done. These will differ depending on the industry, the size of your enterprise and a host of other variables. They can include such things as addressing immediate challenges, improving profitability and raising service levels.

Once these decisions are made, they need to be clearly communicated both to senior management as well as the technicians, engineers and support staff who make up your team. Think of it like posting a list for all to see, not only to educate but to rally the entire organization around needed IT goals, and involve them in its incremental success.

Protect

With today’s uncertainty, the top IT priority can’t be clearer: security.

Security will always be an important concern for IT leaders, but today’s healthcare organizations are under even greater pressure. “Cyberattacks are of particular concern for the health sector because attacks can directly threaten not just the security of systems and information but also the health and safety of patients.”

Healthcare organizations make especially tempting cyberattack targets because they are treasure troves of protected health information (PHI) and personal identifiable information (PII) that can be weaponized for identity theft purposes – or just plain theft.

In 2022, healthcare organizations nationwide averaged 1,410 cyberattacks every week, continuing and expanding on a yearly trend. One cited motivation hackers have for going after healthcare organizations is a perceived absence in security-focused staffing.

Security is especially critical as healthcare becomes more digital and cloud-centric. Helping healthcare enterprises operate securely in today’s environment needs to be any IT team’s top priority.

Personalize

A major advantage of the digital age is the ability to engage patients where they live, on a highly individualized and convenient basis. Today’s medical professionals can visit with and gather vital information from patients miles away, leveraging such things as wearables, video conferencing and electronic health records (EHR).

The move to remote solutions over the last few years has made digitalization more of a mandate for medical practices. Digitalization is data-intensive but does not require large staffs to monitor or control. “Digital health is here to stay,” the American Medical Association points out. “Practices of all sizes have an opportunity to use it to their advantage.”

Maximizing the use of data is key to a more personalized approach to healthcare. The creation of “digital front doors” allows far more than ease of use; it facilitates deeper engagement and promotes a closer and more connected relationship between caregiver and patient.

To this end, employing cloud technology is key to enabling the experience. Cloud technology makes data transfers safer (by removing internet-reliant channels) and more productive (by employing data-driven machine learning to mine similar cases for answers to health issues.) As a platform for incorporating AI solutions, cloud technology can also open avenues for both research and savings on an individualized, patient-by-patient basis.

The personalization of healthcare is also beneficial on-premises, with the management of machines with IoT-based solutions that incorporate individual patient profiles.

“In the long run, pivoting to a cloud environment ensures lower costs and more satisfaction among patients and medical staff.”

Partner

Being small by nature should not inhibit healthcare IT teams from helping their enterprises achieve big things. Any IT team benefits from having a partner they can count on to help stretch out their resources and identify areas of practical growth.

For example, managed security solutions can be employed in such a way as to offer a reliable partner and backstop to protect healthcare enterprises against cyberattack.

Managed Security Service by Spectrum Enterprise is an example of a managed service that can augment and expand the reach of an otherwise constrained IT staff. A managed service partnership like this can allow IT leadership to focus on handling substantive changes, not oversight, and concentrate the people they have in areas of the enterprise where they can do the most good.

When choosing an IT managed services partner, healthcare CTOs and CIOs must first ensure that the provider is willing not only to listen, but be a good partner down the road. IT needs are ever-changing: Make sure you have an IT partner who is ready and able to help you change with them.

Technology is a powerful driver of change in today’s world. Having the potential for revolutionary capacity at one’s hands can seem daunting, if not indeed overwhelming, especially when staffing is low. But having a small IT staff should not limit today’s healthcare enterprise from achieving great things, for itself and ultimately for its patients.

Want to learn more? See the many ways Spectrum Enterprise helps healthcare enterprises achieve the benefits of full digitalization even when their in-house IT teams are less than fully staffed. Discover why 80% of the largest health systems in the United States rely on Spectrum Enterprise for technology solutions.