The healthcare industry has seen many IT challenges over the past years. They have resulted in security attacks, stringent regulatory mandates, and the rise of healthcare costs. Deevita is one of the healthcare software companies that deliver quality healthcare IT services to a wide range of payer and providers.
Below are three of the top IT challenges in healthcare:
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Enhancing cyber security and patient privacy
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Avoiding network blind spots due to mergers and acquisitions
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Transforming the business to align with the consumerization of medicine
Cyber Security
Hospitals and clinics are often targeted by ransomware. The 2017 WannaCry attack that hit the United Kingdom’s National Health Service and the 2016 attack on the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center highlight this point. Most of the victims had to shut down their computer networks, which impacted thousands of patients. Hackers are now integrating new types of malware threats into the SSL encrypted traffic.
Blind Spots from Mergers and Acquisitions
Company mergers and acquisitions (M&A’s) between hospitals and clinics translate to “blind spots” within IT networks. The issue surfaces because disparate corporate data networks are trying to communicate with each other which do not actually transmit data correctly.
Blind spots are areas where IT does not have complete visibility into what is happening on the network or how applications are behaving. Mergers between IT systems for any organization, especially healthcare systems, take time. The problem is that patients and doctors do not have time to wait. Electronic medical records (EMR) must be available at all times, for all patients. So, it is high time to turn to state-of-the-art healthcare IT solutions from providers like Deevita to resolve integration issues in healthcare.
Consumerization of Medicine
A big area of interest for healthcare institutions is the consumerization trend where a lot of information is now being collected and made available to mobile and web-based devices. For instance, hospitals are now embracing BYOD for healthcare professionals and even support the use of patient accessible Wi-Fi. However, as the role of Wi-Fi networks expands within healthcare facilities, a major drawback of consumerization is the uncontrolled consumption of bandwidth.
Conclusion
Consumerization and the need to be competitive are key drivers for the healthcare industry. Cloud networks, IoT, BYOD, telemedicine, and other new technologies are driving change in the healthcare system. How well individual IT organizations can leverage these technology changes will ultimately determine their success.
This includes visibility into potential network and application problems as a result of the new technology, and the ability to improve the performance of healthcare networks.