Many healthcare IT groups are under tremendous pressure to deliver major technology initiatives and meet regulatory mandates.
In addition, they must focus on the primary mission of directly supporting patient safety and providing an optimized IT infrastructure that allows clinicians to efficiently deliver high quality care. Key issues such as Disaster Recovery (DR) planning and strategy, security and provisioning, network and configuration monitoring, help desk support and maintaining High Availability (HA) for many clinical applications also require resource commitment. In light of these challenges, healthcare chief information officers (CIOs) face a complex balancing act of resource allocation issues, as nearly every aspect of the IT infrastructure affects care, quality, safety and clinician satisfaction in some fashion. Yet as every CIO knows, they must optimize systems with their available personnel and budget while and still "keeping the trains running on time".
As the demands of managing the IT infrastructure become increasingly complex, executives need to look to automation, best practices and in some cases, external resources, to minimize risk to patients and reduce physician frustration with technology.
Using automation to optimize systems that support safe, quality care
IT leaders can look to automated solutions for monitoring networks, configurations and application performance to ensure that clinicians have software they can rely on for efficient care delivery. These platforms can link to support functions such as a help desk to offer integrated, high efficiency solutions to problems that might affect clinical software and patient safety. Automation platforms can identify where bottlenecks are building up before end users even notice a performance issue. Technical staff can take proactive measures to fix problems before the help desk starts receiving a steady stream of complaints from end users.
When systems slow down, clinicians can become immensely frustrated – even a screen change that takes more than a few seconds is often unacceptable for providers trying to provide treatment and documentation. System performance or HA that might be acceptable in a different industry can cause clinicians to lose confidence in technology. For example, if a patient experiences a medical event that calls for a very rapid intervention, a physician might need near real-time data on last vital signs, last medication dosage or other clinical information. If the application takes even 10 to 15 seconds to retrieve the data, a doctor will find this performance unacceptable. For this reason, automated monitoring – and proactively optimizing – clinical systems for high performance and HA is a key responsibility of CIOs.
Leveraging automation platforms to monitor the entire IT infrastructure and linking data from the help desk is one way leaders can ensure applications are available to help support high quality care, reduce performance problems and directly address a major source of frustration for clinicians. The help desk function also provides physicians and clinical staff with guidance on using new (or existing) systems to work efficiently. It is a vital resource for the clinical staff and needs to be available 24/7 to help them do their jobs and enhance patient care.
Plan for the worst case
With nearly every aspect of patient care now intimately linked to multiple systems, the ability to recover very quickly and ensure safety is paramount to every hospital's mission. The DR strategy and plan affects the entire organization's ability to provide care in the event of a major catastrophe that renders on-site systems unable to function. It is fair to say that DR is the single most important technical issue for ensuring overall safety. Thus, having an effective and highly responsive DR plan and strategy is an area that directly affects patient safety and clinicians who rely on technology.
Moreover, disaster recovery planning is now becoming such a major issue that accrediting bodies may begin to consider an effective DR strategy in their reviews. Few organizations within healthcare, or any other industry, have the financial wherewithal to design and build their own dedicated "hot site" – a separate and remote data center that replicates every IT system and can come back on line within minutes or hours of disaster to restore function and continue with patient care. Most CIOs would agree that outsourcing firms offer a cost effective solution since they have already made the data center investment and can amortize the expenses over many hospital clients.
Find the right balance for an optimized IT infrastructure
As CIOs evaluate new technologies, internal resources and IT strategy, they can consider a combination of automation and effectively utilizing both internal staff and external services providers. Many hospitals are turning to an IT infrastructure model that leverages some external services along with internal resources to provide end-to-end optimization. Sophisticated outsourcing firms can provide a variety of remote services that help reduce performance issues that affect care delivery, enhance security, and reduce overall risk.
Healthcare leaders who leverage best practices, embrace automation and advanced technology will support and maintain an efficient yet flexible IT infrastructure that enables high quality, safe patient care – and position the organization to seamlessly add new capabilities as clinical, business and technology priorities evolve.
Jim Giordano is President and CEO of CareTech Solutions, an information technology and Web products and services provider for U.S. hospitals and health systems.