Healthcare IT Labeled "Breeding Ground For The Unprepared" By Study

By Megan Williams, contributing writer

One of the key benefits IT solutions providers bring to the organizations they serve is a relief of frustration and confusion around their IT environments. A survey of C-level executives and health IT professionals from Peak 10 highlights the impact of the unprecedented burdens faced by healthcare administrators and gives insight into attitudes and trends around current issues in the industry.

Impact

Both executives and professionals in the industry are feeling the pressures of government mandates and international standards. A full 94 percent of the organization surveyed indicated that government mandates impacted IT decisions and strategies. This especially was true for small and mid-market organizations that had revenues of less than $1 billion annually.

ICD-10 similarly is taking its toll, with organizations indicating Meaningful Use and ICD-10 implementations are impacting costs and revenues. Both of these factors are likely contributors to the fact that 51 percent of respondents expect to see IT budgets increasing over the next two years.

EHRs

While the industry as a whole is moving beyond EHRs to focus on other IT needs, EHR (electronic health records) and EMR (electronic medical records) still pose challenges.

According to the study, organizations are feeling the strain of implementation and upgrades, as well as keeping up with government mandates. IT departments are still heavily focused on cost cutting and maintaining smooth transitions to EHR and EMR systems. Peak 10 prioritized the importance of working with third-party managed services providers (MSPs): “Those that partner with third-party managed services providers can alleviate the burden on IT departments and enable healthcare organizations to deliver better patient care and services. Utilizing the services of an experienced third-party managed services provider can also cut down on configuration and deployment errors, mitigate risk, and deliver a near immediate ROI.

Additional Findings

The report covers multiple other topics including:

• moving to the cloud with SaaS and non-mission critical workloads
• the growing need of organizations (hospitals, pharmaceuticals, biotech firms, etc.) to partner in maintaining high infrastructure reliability
• regulation compliance and mobility, EHR and patient portals
• the high levels of pressure insurance budgets are under and will be under over the next two years