Technology advances at a breakneck pace these days, and small IT teams with limited resources often scramble to keep their tech secure and useful to clinicians. And that can be a problem, since technology only streamlines and optimizes patient care if it can be successfully deployed. So, even when IT resources are strained, healthcare organizations must still move forward with technology, doing whatever they can to keep up.
Maximizing limited resources
One of the best ways to optimize patient care is to optimize your EHR. But how do you even begin? Getting the full benefits of the EHR requires more hours, more funding, and more skilled expertise than many IT teams can provide.
A quality managed services provider can help you overcome strained resources, maximize return on investment, and enable your clinicians to provide gold standard care. Implementing, maintaining, and upgrading an EHR can be complex, but a managed services partner can help you smoothly handle each key change to streamline and elevate both clinician and patient experience.
Plan for success
Having expert backup and oversight helps small or underfunded IT teams avoid feeling frantic when launching new technologies. With the right partner in your corner, optimizing technology for ideal results, or modifying it later, as needed, becomes reassuringly manageable.
Managed services can help your IT team better prepare for successful implementations and be more responsive to problems and upgrades as they arise. You can also avoid many potential difficulties because your provider will know EHR systems, best practices, and potential interoperability problems inside and out. (And if they don’t, you need a different managed services partner!)
A top-quality managed services partner will also tie your success with theirs. If you fail, they fail, and they do not want to fail! This vested interest makes them a true partner, so they operate with the same attention and loyalty you’d want in an on-staff team member.
Adjust your EHR to your workflows
Planning for success requires tailoring your EHR to your specific workflows. Your managed services partner may want to do an on-site walkthrough so that they, and your IT team, understand how the system should interact with clinical workflows.
The best managed services providers won’t automatically settle for second-hand information. They know that seeing workflows in person offers far more valuable insights than could just having those workflows described to you. Interacting with the individuals who directly handle patient care is a real asset, not just for customizing the technology, but also for streamlining workflows. The goal is to simultaneously optimize both the EHR and the clinical experience.
Supporting and optimizing integrations
Once your managed services partner knows your organization, environment, and workflows in-depth, they can facilitate integrations that improve interoperability. For instance, say you have an EHR upgrade and a Citrix upgrade available at the same time. Your managed services partner can help you understand what’s supported by your existing solutions, so you can make an informed choice between waiting on one or upgrading both concurrently.
Managed services support can also help you strategically approach third-party integrations with your EHR. Are you looking for something specific to support your Trauma Room? Are you looking to incorporate e-prescribing into EHR functionality? You maximize your investment by understanding what you do and don’t need.
Conceiving and executing long term plans
A managed services partner can help you avoid obstacles and maximize ROI by providing strategic, long-term services. Setting up technology and learning how to use it are just two phases in an ongoing process of maintaining, optimizing, and updating to get the most out of your systems.
But the right partner won’t just plan for the long term – they’ll be there with you to execute each step. They can smoothly guide your IT team through each upgrade and adjustment, regardless of whether your staff have experience in that area. By getting on a call and staying connected through key changes, a managed services partner can address issues as they come up, putting things in perspective and keeping everyone panic-free and focused on the tasks at hand.
Fresh perspectives help you reach beyond basic functionality
It’s easy to limit yourself by getting stuck using your EHR in a particular way. For example, even if your organization has been using Epic for a long time, you may be missing out on significant efficiency improvements if there’s a secure workflow available you don’t know about. The right managed services partner can recommend a simple switch or adjustment to reduce clicks, avoid errors, and save time and frustration.
Your managed services partner can help you recognize that you aren’t “done” with a new technology just because it’s implemented and working. They’ll help you look beyond basic functionality to determine how your EHR workflows can work even better. They can introduce you to capabilities, strategies, and integrations that unlock new levels of productivity.
Your representative can also illuminate how to get the full value of the licenses you have. Even if you’re implementing the EHR for a specific list of reasons, there’s a lot of unique functionality built into the system that can do even more to streamline workflows. And your provider’s understanding of the vulnerabilities introduced by EHR technology can ensure that your security solutions are configured to keep your systems and data safe.
Ultimately, having a dedicated guide through every phase of your EHR experience sets your organization up to significantly and safely bridge resource gaps and improve clinician experience and patient care.
Learn more
Take a deeper dive into this topic by checking out the on-demand webinar, Bridge IT resource constraints and streamline patient care: Enhancing efficiency and security in healthcare operations.
Christina Berg, RN MHA, is the Director of Healthcare Strategy at Imprivata. To learn more about Imprivata, visit http://www.imprivata.com.