Does your healthcare or medical office have these IT issues?
In the healthcare industry, there’s little margin for error and I hope my family doctor would agree with me. Medical offices can be extremely fast paced and hardly have the time to deal with IT issues. Simply put, they can’t afford to have any downtime. Consider for a minute what downtime would cost your healthcare business? Most modern healthcare providers have implemented computers and systems that are entirely networked. Some of which communicate with the internet to access patient data and history. Yes, you may have the patient’s file lying around, but there’s no guarantee that manual methods will be sufficient. Most healthcare providers and medical practices are entirely dependent on a healthy IT environment.
Does Your Healthcare Office Have These IT Issues?
If you’re currently having IT issues that frequently create downtime you’re on borrowed time until the next technology disaster strikes. Major technology disasters can bring a medical office to a halt really stirring up technical difficulties with their practice.
The best way to avoid technology disasters is to prevent them with preventative maintenance and managed IT services. You know you’ve got real trouble ahead if your healthcare office has any or all of these precursor symptoms:
- Frequent internet outages sometimes down for several minutes
- Slow booting computers
- Internet redirects and pop-ups
- Lost data on the network
- No backup or disaster recovery plan
- Unsure if your computers or network have active security
- Issues with hardware and peripheral devices (printing errors)
If you’re experiencing any or all of these issues, you need to have a serious talk with your IT service provider. Depending on the severity of the issues you’re having, any of the above symptoms are precursors to much larger issues to come. For now, you may be just getting by fine. However, issues can easily multiply if ignored or put aside. The cost of downtime grows exponentially by the hour. Some of the problems you face with a technology disaster are:
- Lost revenue – There are a couple different sources of potential lost revenue for your healthcare practice. More importantly, the loss can effect your patients if unable to provide adequate care due to system outages.
- Reductions in productivity – When your systems or network is down, so is your staff efficiency. Healthcare practices are hit tremendously by loss due to network outages. Of course, you could always try to operate through manual methods, but there’s no guarantee that manual methods will be sufficient – sometimes the information you need to access like medical records or insurance information are inaccessible in an outage.
- Resolving the issue – There will be emergency labor costs incurred from IT service providers needing to get your business up and running fast. There’s never a guarantee depending on the severity of the issue. You could be down days if not weeks!
- Downtime can damage your reputation – When you experience downtime, it has an immediate effect on your customers. Maybe not at first, but the instance you’re late delivering a customer’s order or revising a proposal, your customer’s will immediately know. When this happens even once, a customer may consider taking their business elsewhere.
Ignoring IT Issues Won’t Make Them Go Away
Every instance of downtime hurts your bottom line. Whether your entire network fails or one employee’s workstation crashes, there is a cost associated with each technology disaster. Costs vary depending on the extent of the outage, and the dependency of IT in the practice, but most conservative estimates put downtime at over $1000 every hour.
Downtime can be greatly reduced with proactive monitoring and preventative maintenance of servers and workstations. We help healthcare providers understand the true cost of downtime and how to avoid it by educating our connected network with useful information and resources. In our white paper – The Total IT Solution – we discuss the true costs in downtime associated with technology disasters for medical offices and healthcare providers.
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