Healthcare is one of the fastest growing industries today, thanks to an increased desire for healthy living and the ease of access to excellent medical care. With such an unprecedented surge in demand for medical care, healthcare institutions must seek a strong and robust IT system for efficient management. In fact, today, the IT department is as common as the radiology department in most hospitals. Hospitals rely on IT systems and computer networks to manage the entire patient treatment cycle, from admission to discharge, to the extent that they have come to view the IT department as a value-enhancer, not the “cost center” they were once considered to be.
The flip-side to this overarching reliance on IT is that even the slightest glitch in the IT systems could adversely impact their operations. Add to this federal laws like HIPAA that mandate intense scrutiny of IT system security and patient data integrity, and an IT manager's job becomes all the more challenging.
This white paper puts forth a solution to overcome the various IT challenges and risks that today's healthcare institutions face.
Healthcare institutions come in all sizes, from the basic outpatient-only treatment center down the road to large medical centers in universities and huge community healthcare centers. What they have in common is a strong IT system in place, and even stronger strict federal laws that each institution is governed by; in the case of the large centers, the law is more pronounced, and the fallout of not complying could mean damaging ramifications.
IT spending in healthcare institutions today is like never before, mainly due to the need to manage the health-related information of numerous patients and their medical histories. Also, thanks to information and communication technologies, telemedicine is catching up in a big way, making medical treatment possible from anywhere without the constraints of time and distance.