Modernizing IT for contemporary practices

Communication sits at the heart of healthcare. Discussions between patients and providers, access to data to make the right diagnosis, care coordination across facilities — each step benefits from technology that facilitates the secure and streamlined flow of information.

It's fair to say modernizing digital infrastructure has strong ties to improving practice management, effective care delivery and overall competitiveness. However, it is not without challenges.

Practices must protect against the ongoing cybersecurity risks confronting the industry. In the first three quarters of 2020, more than 350 healthcare organizations reported breaches of protected health information (PHI) to the Department of Health and Human Services affecting 19.7 million patients — more than twice the number of breaches reported during the same period of 2019. Cyberattacks can become especially damaging when they involve strictly regulated PHI. Security measures to confront these threats quickly become ineffective without regular updates, and more avenues for attack emerge as systems grow more complex. In fact, 46 percent of healthcare IT leaders in one study rated system complexity as their biggest barrier to data security.

Compounding the challenge, many practices face skills gaps and limited IT personnel to protect their networks while simultaneously implementing new applications for patient care. These teams are often challenged to standardize systems during mergers or when adding new locations as practices grow. Their maintenance workload becomes time consuming when legacy solutions lack visibility into, or centralized control of, an expanding network. And, especially in light of the budget strains experienced as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, any initiative to improve IT operations must strike the right balance between new capital spending and ongoing operational expenses.

As a result, fewer than one in three healthcare professionals strongly agree their organizations are taking the right steps to build a digital infrastructure that will carry them into the future.

Providers need modern IT solutions that reduce the burden of these challenges by enhancing network capabilities and offering more efficient management as healthcare technology evolves.