Healthcare providers have unique IT and technology support requirements far exceeding a normal business.
Just a few of the unique challenges that providers deal with include:
The best way to meet those challenges is for healthcare providers to partner with an IT and technology firm that has experience managing healthcare IT systems. Below are just some of the ways that the right managed IT service for the healthcare industry can be a major benefit.
The last year was difficult for healthcare cybersecurity, with 656 data breaches affecting over 37 million people in total.
Maintaining network uptime is important in any field. It’s absolutely essential in the medical services field, where downtime could lead to degraded service quality, sub-optimal healthcare outcomes, or even serious consequences for a patient’s health.
To maximize the uptime and availability of your network technology, the Complete Network team provides healthcare providers with a fully managed IT services solution that proactively monitors and maintains the technology in your office to ensure it’s always running smoothly.
What does a managed IT service solution that’s optimized for healthcare providers mean?
The healthcare industry experiences one of the highest cyberattack rates, tripling in just the last three years. Despite being a primary target for criminals, most healthcare companies can’t afford to employ an in-house security team, which means they must rely on an external provider to help them build and maintain their cyber defenses.
When you’re vetting an MSP’s cybersecurity capabilities, here are some of the elements that you’ll want to consider:
HIPAA is a major, ongoing requirement for all healthcare organizations. With the size and frequency of fines continuing to increase, every provider must have a clear strategy for implementing the controls necessary to protect electronic protected health information (ePHI) as it flows through their systems.
HIPAA and HITECH require that ePHI be protected using three different levels of security control– the technical, administrative, and physical.
Technical Controls
Ensure that ePHI is secured against unauthorized access, modification, or deletion while in your network.
Administrative Controls
Policies and procedures to protect ePHI include risk management, incidence response, properly delegated HIPAA duties, security awareness training, and more.
Physical Controls
Ensure the right physical access controls are in place, defining workstation security protocols, and protecting your office space from natural disasters, are other important dimension of compliance.
IT vendor management is another important aspect of HIPAA and HITECH compliance. Our team will help act as a single point of contact for your IT vendors and service providers, helping to close compliance gaps, coordinate security controls, and provide your organization with a comprehensive overview of your entire network environment.
The right managed IT service provider will help you:
Interested in HIPAA Compliance? You may be interested in the following articles:
Cloud computing offers healthcare providers a valuable opportunity to streamline their workflows, ease collaboration between departments, and provide a streamlined patient experience while reducing infrastructure costs and streamlining your IT budgeting.
Here are a few of the specific ways that cloud computing can help healthcare providers:
Complete Network can help you make the most of any new or existing cloud computing program. We have documented processes to ensure the success of any cloud initiative, regardless of its scope or complexity.
The MSP market is crowded, with many providers making marketing claims that they can’t back up.
When choosing a managed IT service provider for the healthcare industry to partner with your organization, how do you know which providers can help you take control of your technology and which just claim to understand your industry?
The first thing to do is to inquire into their experience. Any managed IT service provider with a lot of healthcare experience will be able to demonstrate their successes through client testimonials and case studies. That doesn’t mean talking in generalities; it means speaking in detail about specific cases and outcomes they’ve helped healthcare providers achieve.
Digging Deeper into the Service Level Agreement (SLA)
The SLA is a contract between you and your MSP that outlines the exact terms of their support. Any reputable MSP will back up their solution with a clearly worded SLA, which includes information about the damages they’ll pay for violating that agreement.
Want to learn more about what’s in an SLA? Click here to read more about our service-level agreements.
For over 20 years, we’ve partnered with healthcare organizations throughout Albany, New York, Charlotte, North Carolina, Savannah, Georgia, and Bluffton, South Carolina. Managed IT solutions from Complete Network help you face the complexities of healthcare technology, cybersecurity, and HIPAA compliance with confidence you might never achieve on your own.
Have a question for our experts? Reach us at 877.877.1840 or [email protected]. We look forward to speaking with you soon!