Resource constraints in the healthcare industry, already a significant challenge for nearly every healthcare provider, were exacerbated by the onset of the pandemic nearly four years ago, which impacted high-margin revenue contributions and increased complexity associated with remote care.
Beyond the revenue impact from clinical care associated with elective procedures, which were dramatically reduced during the pandemic, the overall complexity of managing a healthcare IT environment increased with the influx of telehealth and other virtual care solutions. While these trends have waned since the peak of the pandemic, healthcare organizations continue to face difficulties finding and retaining adequate talent and keeping up with an ever-evolving technology landscape.
More organizations are comfortable with remote work, meaning there’s more competition when trying to hire IT experts. An IT architect in Ohio could make more money working remotely for a hospital in California. This, coupled with an IT skills shortage, complicates the hiring landscape. Simultaneously, cyberthreats continue to grow, causing many healthcare organizations to struggle to prioritize their already-strained financial resources, address the skills gap and cope with these threats in a cost-effective manner.
That’s where managed services come in. There are a wide variety of managed services available to healthcare organizations to support internal IT teams through a combination of people, process and tools, so their valuable internal resources can focus on critical work rather than on basic day-to-day tasks. Here’s what healthcare organizations need to know about using managed services.
DISCOVER: Managed services lend expert support to health IT departments.
How Do Managed IT Services Support Healthcare Organizations?
Managed service providers (MSPs) have a portfolio of skills and resources that healthcare organizations can rely on to supplement their internal IT teams. For example, a health system’s network engineer may know how to manage a Palo Alto firewall, a Cisco router and an Arista switch. However, that role requires the worker to be a jack of all trades and a master of none, whereas an MSP has specialized teams consisting of certified engineers focused on each of those technologies that can provide a depth of expertise not achievable by the health system on its own.
Many health systems’ IT departments have headcount constraints and are unable to add an additional full-time employee. However, they still need to ensure that all IT work is done properly and at the pace of technological acceleration occurring today. Managed services can help healthcare organizations offset that constraint.
It's important to know that hiring an MSP isn’t the same as hiring just one person. Using an MSP such as CDW brings a combination of people, processes and tools delivered as a 24/7 service. When we get an alert while monitoring a system, we know what to do with it. We can effectively and efficiently triage, address, remediate and report back on that incident. To get equivalent service internally, a healthcare organization would likely have to hire multiple full-time staffers, in addition to investing in tools, maintaining those tools, and developing and implementing the processes to react to those tools’ outputs.
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