Netgain

Hardware and software refreshes are often viewed as expensive capital investments that never last long enough. When properly planned for, though, refreshes can enable your practice’s growth by boosting productivity and user satisfaction.

Even with cloud adoption, practices still face cyclical hardware and software upgrades for on-premise technology assets like workstations, kiosks and mobile devices. How do you know if your practice needs a refresh? How much will it cost? Do you have the staff support necessary for this kind of refresh?

While the No.  1 priority of healthcare practices is patient satisfaction, compliance continues to be a significant focus for practices across the nation. Modern Healthcare reports that in 2016, there were 106 major healthcare data breaches attributed to hackers and reported to the federal government. Those breaches exposed 13.5 million individuals' records.

Whether you’re shopping for a car, appliances, or another major purchase, you likely pay extra attention to the warranty. What does it cover? How long does it last? What are the stipulations? What happens if it doesn’t work? After all, you have a lot at stake – money, productivity and safety.

When evaluating your cloud computing options, the warranty is equally as important. In the cloud, it’s commonly called the Service Level Agreement (SLA). Every cloud provider’s SLA varies and with your practice’s most sensitive data at stake, choosing the right provider is critical to your cloud strategy.

What’s your communication style? Throughout your career, you’ve likely taken a personality test of some sort. Based on your answers to a defined set of questions, you’ve been identified as a color, an animal or a combination of letters. 

As a part of NetgainU, our continuing education program, employees complete an assessment to determine what color quadrant they best associate with. Each of the four color quadrants have characteristics that describe a communication style. The goal is to understand your communication style and the style of your teammates so communication can be adjusted for mutual benefit. 

Antivirus software is about 40 percent effective, according to ZueS Tracker, a tool that tracks malicious hosts. This statistic is startling, especially for organizations that rely almost solely on antivirus to protect their most sensitive data from malicious attacks. 

Truly protect your business with whitelisting. It is, essentially, the inverse of antivirus.  Antivirus identifies malicious content and stops it from attacking your environment. Whitelisting, on the other hand, is a process of identifying what should be able to run in your environment and blocking everything else.

There is a lot of buzz in the healthcare industry about the cloud – public or private, pros and cons, cost and ROI. What there isn’t a lot of discussion about is the telecom services that can make or break the success of a solution and user experience.

Simply put, telecom refers to the wires responsible for transmitting data from your exam room to the cloud. It is arguably the most important cloud design decision you’ll make for your practice. Your telecom network determines the speed at which your users access data, the security of your data and how much control your practice has over your connectivity.

For almost 50 years, Multicare Associates has provided a wide array of primary care services.

An internal IT staff managed Multicare Associates’ IT environment for 30 providers and 200 staff across three locations. The in-house IT staff supported the primary care clinic’s users, applications, and their infrastructure. But CEO Matt Brandt had concerns about the practice’s aging IT environment and wanted to implement a new EHR solution.

For anyone who has attended the annual HIMSS conference, you know it can be overwhelming. 2017’s HIMSS Annual Conference was no different, with over 40,000 health IT professionals and 1,200+ exhibitors sprawled across what seemed like miles of exhibit hall space at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando. It was abundantly clear that this year, the healthcare industry is hungry for technology solutions to drive efficiency and improve patient experiences.

Much of the buzz at the event was centered on a handful of core topics, so we wanted to share some of those key takeaways here for those of you who weren’t able to make it out to Orlando this year.

A typical physician practice may use Microsoft as their cloud provider for Office 365, use their EHR software provider for their EHR, use a private cloud provider for their practice management and their PACS storage on-site. These solutions all have separate logins, support contacts and service level agreements.

Over 80 percent of healthcare providers are using some form of cloud services within their practice, according to HIMSS Analytics’ 2016 Cloud Survey. Patient engagement and empowerment tools are the most common tools in the cloud (35%), followed by health information exchange (34%), back office solutions (18%) and business continuity and disaster recovery functions (13%).

Your EHR is the lifeblood of your practice. Likely the most critical aspect of your practice’s productivity. Yet, so many practices don’t properly research where their EHR is hosted. We’ve developed a checklist of best practices to help you find the best cloud provider for your EHR.

Forty-four percent of EHR products are web-based or hosted, according to a recent survey by Capterra, a service designed to help businesses find the right software. The survey also reports that 51 percent of the EHR products in their directory are cloud-based.