Does your community hospital leadership expect new technology to solve old problems? If so, it’s time for a perspective shift. In reality, optimizing your hospital’s existing technology and adjusting processes accordingly is usually the quicker, more cost-effective option. Buying new systems won’t automatically make problems go away. By Phil Stravers, ICE Technologies, Inc.
By Phil Stravers, ICE Technologies, Inc.
Does your community hospital leadership expect new technology to solve old problems? If so, it’s time for a perspective shift. In reality, optimizing your hospital’s existing technology and adjusting processes accordingly is usually the quicker, more cost-effective option. Buying new systems won’t automatically make problems go away.
If you want your hospital’s IT to improve operations and deliver the most value possible, understand when you should be optimizing instead of replacing. Here are some points to consider the next time you assemble your IT governance committee (or as we call it, IT Steering Team).
Should I Optimize Or Replace?
It’s probably time to optimize your community hospital’s existing technology if:
- Your healthcare technology fails to enhance core business functions, such as revenue cycles and CPOE.
- Your employees are failing to engage with your healthcare technology, finding workarounds and interrupting workflow.
- It seems like every problem you’ve had recently is an “IT problem.”
On the other hand, replacing your community hospital’s technology might make sense if:
- Your HCIS do not provide the data or information you need to make sound business decisions.
- Supporting and maintaining legacy technology is cost-prohibitive, due to the specialized expertise required.
- Your chosen vendor is inconsistent, liable to go out of business or refuses to continually improve offerings.
When Is A Hybrid Approach Best?
In many cases, your community hospital is best off replacing certain IT elements and preserving others — a hybrid approach. For example, it’s generally a good idea to consolidate software interfaces into a single portal, reducing required access time and improving efficiency. A community hospital looking to implement this technology would need to invest in new software, but changes to the existing technical infrastructure would be minimal.
Keep in mind, however, your healthcare IT approach must be rooted in a comprehensive strategy that considers people and processes along with technology. Many hospitals today, for instance, are spending time and money trying to integrate ambulatory and acute care EHR software in an attempt to streamline operations.
While this is good practice in certain instances, if the new system interrupts your established physician workflow and their buy-in isn’t factored, your create more problems than you solve. Remember, your tools exist solely to empower your users.
Advantages Of Optimization
Optimizing instead of replacing technology has considerable advantages. Specifically, by optimizing your community hospital’s IT, you:
- Reduce costs. This is the obvious benefit. By optimizing instead of replacing, you’ll see efficiency gains and operations improvements on a reduced budget. Naturally, this drives ROI — sometimes by millions of dollars.
- Improve adoption. Typically, optimizing your current system starts an important user adoption conversation that leads to better staff engagement. If you replace, users might just find new workarounds.
- Create best practices. It’s easier to develop and implement best practices when your hospital’s staff is familiar with the systems in place. Bringing in new systems delays implementation of best practices because ramp-up time is needed.
- Reach goals faster. Optimizing to reach your goals makes project completion possible in a matter of months, whereas replacement often takes upwards of a year.
Advantages Of Replacement
There are also specific advantages associated with replacing your healthcare technology instead of optimizing it. By replacing, you generally:
- Capture better data. Newer healthcare technology tends to include more detailed, sophisticated data reporting features that help you make informed business decisions. As healthcare continues to evolve, the role of data in developing operations becomes increasingly important.
- Improve user satisfaction. While users typically get on board with an optimized system quicker than an entirely new one, many people enjoy the idea of working with “state-of-the-art” technology.
Strategy Driving Results
When deciding whether to optimize or replace your community hospital’s technology, weigh the advantages of each, consider your operational and financial goals, and arrive at the strategically sound decision.
To make the best decision possible, it’s imperative that you conduct thorough internal and external assessments to determine where your community hospital’s IT is providing value, and importantly, how your users are interacting with your systems.
If you aren’t sure how to navigate the assessment and strategic development process, consider working with a community hospital IT expert that has the experience, knowledge and resources to help you realize the greatest value from your technology investments.
About the author
Phil Stravers has been in Information Technology and Healthcare industries for nearly 24 years and has been with ICE Technologies since 1995. Phil has personally served as an interim Chief Information Officer to numerous community hospitals and has led services teams that have helped healthcare facilities across the United States succeed with Information Technology. Since becoming one of the co-owners of ICE in 2003, Phil has guided the development of a services portfolio that is tailored specifically to the distinct IT needs of community healthcare providers, including the Healthcare Grade Network Model™, value-added hosting and best practice EHR content, implementation, and support methodologies. To learn more, shoot Phil a note on LinkedIn!
About ICE Technologies, Inc.
ICE Technologies is an organization singularly focused on helping healthcare organizations with their IT challenges. We make your hospital’s IT work better. So, let us know if you need help optimizing your EHR implementation, improving your network reliability, improving your reporting or your IT strategy, or just need to fill a gap on your IT team. Find out how strategic community hospital IT helps you get more value.
