Why Health Systems Should Outsource Managed Services

We realize that it’s a bold statement to use the word should, but our team has worked with many hospitals to dial in their Healthcare IT infrastructure. While it’s not unusual for health systems to keep as much as possible in-house, let’s think about the opportunities when managed services for hospitals are outsourced. You may not resonate with every area we highlight today, but it’s important to know that there are options.

Do Less But Better: Managed Services To Free Up IT Staff

One of the advantages of hiring a technical partner like 314e to manage EHRs and the overall technology landscape is that employed IT resources can be freed up to focus on initiatives unique to your organization. By leveraging a staff augmentation model for manning the help desk, overseeing issue ticketing and tracking, data management, and event monitoring, you’re leaving the local professionals who know your operations better than most to support in-house optimization efforts.

Resources that are spread too thin can rarely contribute as strongly to a project as they could if given the runway to dive in deep and provide optimal value to the business.

Tap Into The Pulse Of Healthcare IT Trends And Best Practices With A Managed Services Partner

Rarely do CTOs and CIOs have adequate bandwidth to monitor and explore all the latest and greatest trends when it comes to healthcare IT. This certainly includes most current best practices, which is a big gap when you consider the industry’s pace of regulatory and operational changes.

There may be aspects of the Epic suite that haven’t been optimally implemented or configured, for example, leaving an opportunity on the table and a robust tool ineffectively leveraged. Support tickets may be running IT staff ragged due to dated software and processes, precluding any real proactive efforts while buried under reactive cycles. Data dictionaries may be grossly behind, lacking available minds to tend to the task, while data conversation efforts are happening haphazardly, carrying forward bad data and habits to new solutions. The list goes on, right?

Efficiencies can be gained when in-the-know professionals are tapped to manage any of the areas we’ve mentioned above (as well as the many others that plague hospital IT stakeholders). By hiring a Best in KLAS Managed Services Partner like 314e, you wisely add to the value of existing staff without placing a tremendous burden on IT leadership to know all and understand all of the leading-edge solutions to maximize patient throughput, revenue cycle management, and operational success.

In other words, let the geeks do what we do best.

Optimization Is VALUABLE

When you hear the word “value” here, you should be thinking in financial terms. Sure, we’ve demonstrated there is another value in outsourced Managed Services for health systems, but what we’re talking about here is the cost savings associated with leveraging partners to manage day-to-day aspects (or even project-specific aspects) of IT management.

The real opportunity on this front emerges when we consider clients who have gotten off the crazy train of putting out perpetual fires and focused on a few key areas where they could get in front of problems and reduce the constant leading-edge taxing of in-house technical staff. In some cases, this is opting for an Epic upgrade and getting our help to plan for that process. In other cases, it was getting IT out from under the help desk tickets so they could complete efforts toward cloud adoption, which is highly valuable the sooner it is in place!

So in some cases, taking action for something “easy” but distracting opens the door for completing far more impactful work that benefits stakeholders across the board.

The Paradox: Outsourcing Can Be Empowering For Your Staff

Some may balk at the idea of stepping on toes or undermining confidence in their teams by bringing in outside help, but this mindset is a mistake. Instead, consider how powerfully and effectively IT Departments could support the spectrum of patient care activities if they were empowered by well-trained support teams to multiply their ability to get the most important things done, all while the daily needs are tended to as well. Outsourcing Managed Services is a great way to bolster the healthcare IT infrastructure of hospitals and health systems!