Technology has been playing an increasingly significant role in the healthcare industry since the adoption of electronic health records (EHRs). EHRs give healthcare providers access to patients’ medical histories and enable them to make intelligent, data-driven decisions related to diagnoses and treatment plans.
Other innovations in healthcare technology include telehealth, which has made healthcare more accessible, and wearables or IoT devices, which have empowered doctors to monitor, track, and analyze patients’ vital signs. As the healthcare industry has embraced technology, the complexity of managing the IT environment has increased along with the level of risk.
IT services help hospitals and medical centers meet the challenges of using innovative technology. With IT services, healthcare providers can revolutionize their healthcare delivery by improving patient care, enhancing data security, and streamlining operations.
Network services ensure that healthcare providers are supporting their technology systems with fast and reliable networks. These networks are necessary for transmitting and sharing EHRs that contain patient medical histories. The data in these medical records is needed to arrive at diagnoses and make treatment decisions.
With network services, healthcare providers can implement the right type of connectivity solution to meet the requirements of their industry-specific technology. For example, Wi-Fi provides the agility hospitals and medical centers need to support medical devices and transmit data to first responders in the field. WAN optimization can accelerate network speeds while providing the connectivity needed to cover a large hospital campus.
Time is of the essence when caring for patients, especially in emergency situations. The faster doctors and first responders can treat a patient using accurate and complete information, the better the outcome. When healthcare providers use network services to build high speed networks, doctors can access real-time data to make the most appropriate and informed decisions when evaluating and treating patients.
Network security services give healthcare providers the peace of mind they need to focus on patient care and develop more innovative ways of treating patients. Hospitals and medical centers are often targeted by cyberattacks, including ransomware.
Cybercriminals single out healthcare providers due to the personally identifiable, financial, and medical information they store and handle. This information is a hot commodity on the black market because it can be used to commit identity and insurance fraud.
Network security services deliver 24/7 monitoring to detect and prevent breaches of EHR systems, as well as to protect medical data while in transit. With network security services, healthcare providers benefit from automatic updates and patching.
These automated processes ensure that hospitals are always operating using the latest and most secure network technologies when transmitting patient information. Secure networks support the interoperability of healthcare IT systems, allowing stakeholders to share patient information across computer systems at different medical facilities safely.
When healthcare providers use network security services, they can feel confident that they are using complete and accurate data to make treatment decisions. Working with data that hasn’t been compromised enables doctors to leverage AI-powered capabilities for diagnosing illnesses accurately, preventing risk, and delivering personalized patient care.
Compliance services ensure that hospitals and medical centers are following HIPAA compliance regulations. HIPAA compliance governs the access of sensitive patient medical information. Under HIPAA, healthcare providers must allow patients to access their medical information while denying access to unauthorized parties. These regulations protect patient privacy, establishing necessary trust between doctors and the people they care for.
With compliance services, healthcare providers can spend less time maintaining and tracking compliance and more time on improving quality of patient care. Compliance services take over complex and time-consuming processes, such as keeping records of access attempts for auditing purposes, conducting assessments, and carrying out corrective actions.
Securing patient data against breaches is one way healthcare providers can ensure they are making sound medical decisions. Data protection or data resiliency is the other part of the equation. Hospitals and medical centers need cloud services, especially disaster recovery as a service, to guarantee that they can recover patient information quickly after a natural disaster or equipment failure.
The cloud can be used to back up EHRs and deliver instant failover to restore data to its original state, ensuring continuity of care for patients. The cloud provides off-site backup for hospitals without the expense of building a secondary data center. When patient data is backed up and stored in the cloud, it is protected from any traumatic event that might impact an on-site data center or hospital campus, including a ransomware attack that would encrypt EHR and lock down systems.
Seamless, real-time communication between doctors, nurses, and first responders is essential for providing cutting-edge healthcare. Unified Communications (UC) services equip healthcare teams with all the tools they need to share information and collaborate on treatment decisions. These tools include chat and instant messaging, along with audio, video, and web conferencing.
With UC services, doctors can communicate with first responders in the field, providing them with specialized expertise and information about the patient’s medical history. Patients can also communicate with doctors wherever they are located. Web conferencing and video chat enable doctors to offer telehealth visits for patients that deliver a face-to-face experience during remote consultations.
To benefit from IT services, healthcare providers need to partner with a technology company that understands the IT systems they work with, such as EHR platforms. The IT service provider must also be well versed in industry-specific compliance regulations, especially HIPAA.
Xceptional offers a wide range of IT services that we can customize to meet the requirements of the healthcare industry so that healthcare providers can benefit from data-driven transformation. Along with Network, Network Security, Cloud, and Unified Communications Services, we offer Compliance-as-a-Service through our Managed Compliance Platform.
With Xceptional Compliance Manager, healthcare providers receive regular scanning, reporting, and documentation for the HIPAA regulatory compliance framework. We will work with your healthcare organization to put together the right mix of IT services to help you improve patient care and move your medical technology into the future.
Could your healthcare organization benefit from IT services? Reach out to Xceptional today.