Netgain

Learning to regulate temperature. Learning to breathe. Learning how to eat. Most people take it for granted that their newborn baby can do these things on their own but Cory Johnson, a support analyst at Netgain, had to watch his son learn these things on his own after being born 10 weeks early.

It’s the experience of the days following his son Owen’s birth that led Cory to become an advocate forMarch of Dimes and led the charity to be selected as one of Netgain’s Casual for a Cause programs.

Volunteering for United Way community projects. Coaching youth sports. Joining committees to better childhood education. These are all ways Netgain team members give back to our community and causes they are passionate about.

We recently sat down with a few Netgain team members to learn more about causes they care about. These team members are all dedicated to their job, but being a Netgain employee also means they get paid to volunteer.

We all login to many websites. Online banking, social media, and shopping and news sites are just a few examples. Chances are we even created accounts on now long-forgotten websites. And, like many other people we used the same, or only a few different usernames and passwords. And worse yet, we may have used the same login credentials as we use at our place of work. That is a problem—others can gather our credentials from less protected sites to gain access to our sensitive healthcare data. It happens all the time. Exploiting human behavior to defeat security safeguards remains the leading cause of breach.  

In Part I of The Benefits of Moving to the Cloud, we discussed how cost effective, scalable, and secure it is to implement a cloud solution for your healthcare Information Technology (IT) needs. While these are great benefits, there are even more reasons a cloud IT solution is ideal for small hospitals and offices with multiple physicians who are short on IT staff, but high on demand for quality healthcare services.

As technology has advanced over the years, dependence on the internet for business reasons has increased significantly.  People conduct research online for everything from the cheapest hotels to the best primary care physicians.  This research generally includes online reviews of products, services, and professionals.  

While online reviews can be beneficial to a business, they can often have a negative affect as well.  Online review sites such as Yelp and others social media sites are often referred to as the internet "Wall of Shame," since users tend to try to shame businesses, and warn others not to use them. Therefore it's vital for a practice to have someone routinely check these sites in order to guard against disgruntled patients and to maintain their reputations within the community. 

There is no question that technological advances are being made at ever-increasing speeds.  If you’re in the business of providing health services that fact may make you a little uneasy.  It’s one thing to provide quality care and healing, quite another to have to manage Information Technology (IT) systems that seem to change overnight while still providing excellent patient care.

In an age when virtually all talk about computers seems to revolve around cloud solutions, it may seem a little strange to hear someone ask you what you're doing to maintain and upgrade your hardware infrastructure.  But the truth is, making sure that computer hardware is up to the demands of today's business environment is a key function of any vigilant healthcare IT department.

Business owners must be reassured that investing in outsourced IT services will be worth the cost.  The real costs are not in the payment for services, but in the shortcomings that can arise if these services are not retained.  IT failures raise costs in terms of lost productivity, compromised data, and regulatory issues. Here are three specific ways that your IT partner prevents failures and reduces the likelihood of costly mistakes associated with your IT. 

As a healthcare professional, we realize that you are striving to lower costs while improving your quality of patient care.  We understand that you face additional requirements of meeting your IT goals within your highly regulated industry.  You must find solutions that comply with the strict requirements of HIPAA regulations and also offers tight security controls for storing your patients' Protected Health Information (PHI).

Earlier this year Robert E. Watson, president and CEO, Streamline Health wrote an article for Healthcare IT News in which he discussed the exploding growth of IT in healthcare applications.  In this article he states, “In a matter of years, the healthcare industry has changed from measuring the size of data in terabytes and petabytes to exabytes and even zettabytes—and this volume of data is doubling every year.”

This rapid increase in Healthcare IT (HIT) volume could well be one of the key reasons for an increased trend for hospitals toward outsourcing these functions.  An article in Becker’s Hospital Review last fall indicated that “The U.S. healthcare IT outsourcing market is expected to grow by 42.8 percent in the next five years”.