Optimizing Every Healthcare IT Dollar€¦ · At a time when CXOs and healthcare boards of directors are demanding “more, better, faster” from their IT departments, but budgets

Optimizing Every Healthcare IT DollarCost-Effective, Efficient Digital Transformation Requires the Strategic Use of Cloud, Automation and Managed Services

Electronic health records are moving to the cloud, telehealth is becoming a business requirement, and progressive new technologies like deep machine learning and digital pathology interpretation will become mainstream before you know it. The question is, will your organization be ready?

When compared to the state of digital readiness in other industries, healthcare as a whole still has some maturing to do. Despite the technological advancements being brought to market that have the capacity to change the face of clinical outcomes and value-based care, many healthcare organizations have yet to lay the technological foundation necessary to fully embrace these advancements as they shift from industry buzz to critical performance differentiators.

The challenge for most healthcare organizations isn’t a lack of knowledge – most are well-versed and aware of the innovations on the horizon. Instead, the problem for organizations lagging in their digital transformation initiatives often points to a lack of the budget and personnel needed to take their next steps into tomorrow’s more digitally enabled world.

To deliver the technology that supports hyperconverged data centers, precision medicine or genomics, for example, requires the full focus and attention of a unique breed of IT specialists. And while these people may already be on a hospital’s IT staff, if they’re bogged down with the daily operation of the provider’s IT infrastructure, the intellectual bandwidth the organization needs to tackle the implementation and deployment of new clinical or research technologies simply isn’t available – and, in most cases, there’s not enough room in the budget to hire new staff to fill that void.

At Logicalis Healthcare Solutions, we’ve helped countless healthcare organizations assess where they are along their digital transformation journeys. When an organization is stuck, unable to move forward with its digital transformation plans, examining its use of managed services, ITSM and the cloud often helps it take those all-important next steps toward a more efficient, secure, digitally enabled future.

Digital transformation is happening in all industries, and it will happen in healthcare whether healthcare IT professionals are ready or not.

If you’re nodding in agreement, yet skeptical that there actually is a solution to this vexing problem, keep reading.

Managed Services: Why Outsourcing Is No Longer a Four-Letter WordMany healthcare IT departments today find their staff is too overcommitted and underfunded to investigate and implement the innovative technologies available in today’s market. The quick-and-easy answer, many believe, is increasing their staff, but it is increasingly difficult to find and retain IT professionals with the right skills – and simply adding staff alone won’t be enough. To be ready to deploy and support these new technologies, hospitals need a better digital foundation. They need to automate key processes and move carefully selected workloads to the cloud, freeing both money and time to focus on these complex new initiatives.

In a resources-constrained environment where the healthcare IT team is spending 80 percent or more of its time monitoring events, implementing patches, overseeing backups, staying compliant and managing the service desk, real digital transformation isn’t an option.

Constrained by the ability to devote only about 20 percent of their time to forward-looking projects, it is nearly impossible for a healthcare organization’s IT team to implement the service automation, robust security and cloud strategies that will form the bedrock of its digital strategy. This is something that CIOs and IT departments in every industry wrestle with on a daily basis. To free the time and resources needed for digital transformation and the implementation of advanced technologies that will make or break a healthcare organization’s reputation in the marketplace, CIOs simply must find a way to flip that 80/20 rule upside down. The simplest and most cost-effective way to do that is through the use of managed services.

Savvy managed service providers (MSPs) offer an array of solutions that can effectively make them an extension of a healthcare organization’s own IT staff, including service desk solutions, managed security, managed infrastructure and managed cloud solutions. In such arrangements, the service provider takes over the day-to-day, repeatable management and maintenance tasks that are currently monopolizing the time of the healthcare IT organization, and it often does so more affordably than the healthcare organization can do by hiring additional internal staff. In fact, it’s no longer feasible for a hospital’s IT team to do everything alone and do it cost effectively. Now is the time to shift left, moving the fulfillment of this need to a less costly – and with the right MSP – more skilled option.

Many CIOs across a variety of vertical markets have already made the decision to do just that. In a recent survey of 890 CIOs around the world, one in four said they already outsource most (more than 50 percent) of their IT to a trusted MSP. But how do you choose – which MSP is the right one?

“The right managed service provider to help healthcare organizations take the next big step forward in digital transformation is one that has a history in solving the particular challenges they face and one that offers absolute leading-edge service automation, cloud adoption and compliance tracking and reporting strategies,” says Karen Burton, Healthcare Business Development Manager, Logicalis Healthcare Solutions. “Being under-staffed and unable to move forward is not a problem that will resolve itself. CIOs have to find a way to cost-effectively expand their staffs, freeing time and resources to focus on the implementation of new technologies before the organization falls behind the digital transformation curve. Managed services gives them that option.”

The Business Case for Managed Services

� Access to technologists with high-level certifications and diverse experiences in the healthcare IT field

� Implementation of service management best practices

� Predictable monthly costs and stringent service-level agreements (SLAs) that ensure quality of service

� Reduced risk of downtime

� Detailed performance reviews

� Opportunities to focus on supporting the organization’s newest clinical and research technologies, building competitive advantage in the process

Healthcare organizations often turn to MSPs for very specific tasks like managed firewall services, for example, when their internal staff is unable to handle the sheer volume of incidents and potential indicators of compromise. Imagine, for example, how much more complex and time-consuming these issues will soon become as the proliferation of data and the exposure to potential breaches expands with the use of medical Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Few hospitals today are prepared for this – the medical device bioengineers and the hospital IT staff rarely have coffee together, much less create strategic profiles and policies to prevent network breaches created by weak links in the IoT network interface.

With a shrinking pool of qualified IT resources from which to choose, it’s important that healthcare CIOs committed to achieving digital transformation ask themselves, realistically, without embracing the idea of outsourcing some tasks to a trusted managed services partner, will this problem get any better with time?

“At its simplest, employing managed services gives you a fast on-ramp to digital transformation,” says Ahren Ewbank, Business Solutions Consultant at Logicalis Healthcare Solutions. “By definition, when you employ managed services, you get the benefits of best practices consistencies and the underpinning for service automation and cloud capabilities for the same or less cost than you could hire and implement internally. Outsourcing mundane, yet vital, day-to-day IT operations tasks expands your IT capacity, freeing the time and resources you need to adopt that next wave of technology critical to patient care. Partnering with a skilled managed services provider is a quality-value equation. With the right choice of partner, you get better quality for less money – it’s that simple.”

Using IT Service Management to Do More with What You Already Have

At a time when CXOs and healthcare boards of directors are demanding “more, better, faster” from their IT departments, but budgets are not expanding commensurately, the right automation and IT service management (ITSM) strategies offer CIOs another important success-building option: Migrate what you can to the cloud, then automate what you keep in house so neither IT nor clinicians spend unnecessary valuable time on maintenance and management of systems that could effectively run themselves.

There are many functions performed by internal IT staff in healthcare organizations today that are both extremely time consuming and leave room for significant and very damaging human error. Consider what happens when a hospital employee is terminated, for example. An average employee in a hospital setting has access to over 30 different applications, two or three electronic medical records systems, and physical access to labs and buildings. Revoking those privileges manually may take days, and if people are busy, even longer – or the request may be forgotten entirely – leaving the door wide open for a compliance incident to occur. In an automated system, however, once the request has been made, these privileges could be revoked in just minutes without any further human intervention.

In a healthcare IT setting, clearly one of the most important ways to save time, money and prepare the IT team to take on new digital enablement tasks is to build in repeatability wherever possible, something which has the added benefit of increasing the accuracy of IT tasks and improving the organization’s overall reporting and compliance posture in the process. To do that, CIOs must take a serious look at their ITSM governance policies and their current configuration management strategy, and adjust where needed before moving to the next phase in their digital transformation journey.

“Employing managed services gives you a fast on-ramp to digital transformation.”

- Ahren Ewbank, Business Solutions Consultant

“New technologies already visible on the horizon will require healthcare organizations to be much more ‘digitally mature.’”

- Kim Garriott, PrincipalConsultant

The more automated IT services can be, the more time the organization’s IT specialists have available to focus on important clinical needs like marrying patient images to their electronic health record (EHR) profiles, connecting collaboratively with other hospitals or patients via telehealth, or incorporating other advanced digitally enabled technologies from precision medicine to artificial intelligence (AI).

“New technologies like these that are already visible on the horizon will require healthcare organizations to be much more ‘digitally mature,’” says Kim Garriott, Principal Consultant, Logicalis Healthcare Solutions. “Despite the complexity involved in preparing to take full advantage of these emerging capabilities, the payoff in better patient outcomes and, ultimately, better value for the organization and patient alike, will make the journey worthwhile.”

By employing ITSM solutions that can automate repeatable IT functions from incident reporting to access requests, the healthcare organization can operate in a more secure and efficient manner with fewer dedicated personnel, freeing valuable technical brainpower for more strategic projects.

Think for a moment about the IoT example mentioned earlier in this paper. Something as small as a sensor on an IV pump can open the door to a security breach, so any IoT devices, no matter their size, must be catalogued and monitored throughout their lifecycle. EMR Workstations On Wheels (WOWs) that push out updates, location trackers for cardiology equipment – anything that connects to the organization’s network must be tracked and managed, and each configuration item’s vulnerabilities must also be known and patched as patches become available. Doing just this manually would overwhelm most IT departments. Thankfully, though, these processes can be completely automated. And in the case of IoT devices and sensors, this is exactly where a strong ITSM strategy with a well-planned configuration management component comes into play.

“If you have the right framework in place, your organization can evolve as its digital transformation takes shape,” says Mike Alley, Service Management Principal, Logicalis US. “But you can’t take full advantage of the Internet of Things – or the developing digital age – without a strong overall service management strategy which includes configuration management as a key component. Configuration management is one of the top service management processes, and while people

talk a lot about it, it is the least implemented, yet perhaps the most foundational. If you don’t get configuration management right, you can’t build what you need to create a true digital strategy on top of it.”

While too many resources in hospital IT departments today are spent fighting fires, a faster and more prescriptive remediation to incidents, root cause analyses, change management functions, and access requests is the implementation of intelligent IT service management principles. Automation saves time, and more time in the IT department translates quickly into advanced digital capabilities.

“Hospitals all have good intentions. They buy the most advanced systems and software, but hit a wall between purchase and deployment because they don’t have the resources – either people or infrastructure – to implement and manage them,” says Sara Hunter, Service Delivery Director, Logicalis Healthcare Solutions. “That’s what this kind of IT transformation can do for hospitals. With the right combination of managed services, IT service management and cloud strategies, the IT department’s bandwidth is expanded, and they can focus on the complex IT issues that require specialized healthcare knowledge like genomics and digital pathology – the things they can’t outsource or automate.

“By outsourcing and automating what they can, it becomes possible for healthcare CIOs and their IT departments to do more with what they already have”

- Sara Hunter, Service Delivery Director

“If you have the right framework in place, your organization can evolve as its digital transformation takes shape.”

- Mike Alley, ServiceManagement Principal

Embracing the Cloud is the Beginning of Real TransformationToday, agile IT organizations in every industry have realized they need to change the way they think about their role in the organization. Rather than seeing themselves as a technology-defined department, these organizations have undergone a transformation that has led them to adopt a services-defined mentality. In other words, IT is no longer all about the infrastructure you own and manage in house; instead, it’s about the quality of services you can efficiently and cost-effectively deliver to users throughout your organization. To deliver a more agile IT experience, CIOs have realized, requires a new operational and consumption model that relies on the cloud as a vital and viable part of the plan.

Until recently, however, out of concern for the security of patient data and compliance with regulations, healthcare IT professionals had typically avoided moving workloads to the cloud, thereby missing out on the role the cloud can play in the organization’s digital transformation.

Today, things have changed. Cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, which were previously reluctant to take on the security and compliance requirements the healthcare market demands, have now embraced it. And now that security for cloud solutions has matured, some of the industry’s most important software providers – organizations like Cerner and Epic whose applications traditionally ran only in on-premise data centers – are now offering hospitals private hosting options. As a result, healthcare organizations can now safely move their most mission-critical and sensitive core applications off site using a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model that eliminates much of the management burden for these solutions from the hospital’s IT department. Therefore, it has become critical that healthcare IT departments not only develop, but also implement, an enterprise-wide cloud strategy that allows them to take advantage of SaaS offerings like these as well as other significant clinical opportunities made possible only via the cloud.

“Physicians providing remote cardiac consultation via telehealth and surgeons overseeing delicate operations from half a world away are some of the glamorous capabilities of the healthcare cloud that get headlines, but the ability for teams of healthcare researchers to share clinical trial data with regions that would otherwise lack the proper infrastructure are just as important,” says Michael Riley, U.S. Healthcare Leader, Logicalis Healthcare Solutions. “Some providers have been deploying cloud-based apps and access for a while and others are just beginning to get into the conversation because of new applications that fit well into cloud architectures. Wherever the starting point, healthcare IT professionals must assess their on-premises capabilities and performance as well as design hybrid cloud models that allow them to place workloads where they can be the most productive and cost effective.”

By establishing a cloud-first strategy, and by sharing that strategy with line-of-business (LOB) leaders throughout the organization, healthcare CIOs will be able to regain control of the IT functions previously lost to “shadow IT” practices. Such functions include the ability to negotiate and manage SaaS contracts on a corporate scale and to utilize IT technical staff more effectively without the need to support shadow IT solutions randomly ordered and operated by individual LOB departments. The development of an enterprise cloud strategy will also allow the healthcare organization’s IT department to centrally control the budget, design, support and security compliance for the cloud services the organization purchases going forward.

“Physicians providing remote cardiac consultation via telehealth and surgeons overseeing delicate operations from half a world away are some of the glamorous capabilities of the healthcare cloud that get headlines, but the ability for teams of healthcare researchers to share clinical trial data with regions that would otherwise lack the proper infrastructure are just as important.”

- Michael Riley, U.S. Healthcare Leader

“One of the most important things IT can do is to align the needs of the business with the resources that can help it operate in a more agile way,” says Kevin Clark, Business Solutions Consultant, Cloud and Managed Services, Logicalis Healthcare Solutions. “When that leads to the cloud, IT leaders will then need a service management catalog that defines the IT services to be provided and an automation strategy that demonstrates to the hospital’s lines of business that IT, acting as an internal service provider, can now broker those services in a reasonable timeframe.”

All of this, of course, takes planning. Acquiring cloud services is much like managing a merger – it requires a thorough understanding and evaluation of the organization’s current IT assets, a clear vision of the “to be” end state, the criteria for deciding which applications and services are the best fit for the new healthcare IT environment, and a roadmap for effective ongoing governance. Before the cloud can become an asset, the healthcare organization needs to do some important groundwork.

1. Assess your infrastructure’s cloud readiness: Examine everything from the organization’s network and security programs to its ITSM policies and service desk operation. Visibility is also critical. Most healthcare IT departments today are already virtualized, but not all have the visibility to manage each business service independently or the bandwidth to operate a critical application or workload in the cloud as efficiently as in an on-premise data center.

2. Establish your requirements for working with a cloud service provider: Here, security and compliance considerations must be front and center. Even if the chosen cloud provider is HIPAA-compliant, consider how the organization will connect with and transmit data to that cloud provider – if data isn’t encrypted throughout the send-receive process, it’s not safe or compliant.

3. Analyze cloud offerings from a cost-benefit perspective: Start by assessing which applications are appropriate to move to the cloud, which workloads are ready for the cloud, and which would be best managed on-premise. It’s easy to assume that running a workload in a public cloud will be less costly than on-premise or even than a hybrid cloud solution – but that is not always the case. The cost-benefit analysis of moving any workload to the cloud, therefore, needs to include a long-term look at both hard costs, like user licenses, and soft costs such as the people and infrastructure it takes to operate those applications in an on-premise data center. Many organizations find a hybrid approach works best. Leveraging a combination of hosted public and private clouds along with an in-house cloud is often the only way to acquire agility and cost benefits without sacrificing availability and security. Another key consideration includes the resiliency of the cloud provider’s offerings: What happens, for example, if the hospital is running a business-critical workload in the cloud and the cloud provider’s facility is hit by a tornado – how quickly can the hospital be up and running again? Be sure to also consider data retention. In a time when the number of discrete images captured and stored is exploding annually, and the requirement for archiving those images is lengthening, it’s important to know if the cloud provider offers a solution that moves those images from high-performance, highly accessible storage to a less-costly archival option over time.

“One of the most important things IT can do is to align the needs of the business with the resources that can help it operate in a more agile way.”

- Kevin Clark, Business Solutions Consultant, Cloud

and Managed Services

Clearly, digital technologies are transforming the way every business operates today – and healthcare is no different. Realistically, CIOs know that the scale of these changes is significant, and they are determined to transform their organizations into agile, digitally inspired innovators in their respective markets.

By partnering with a trusted managed services partner to lighten the burden IT currently shoulders, implementing IT service management policies to automate repeatable tasks and requests, and creating and sharing an enterprise cloud strategy, healthcare organizations will be ready for the next phase in their digital transformations.

The savings in both time and money that result from carefully and methodically laying the groundwork in these three core areas will allow healthcare CIOs to dedicate more internal resources to the investigation and deployment of new mission-critical technologies that will prepare them to be digitally enabled trendsetters ready for the clinical challenges that lie ahead.

To learn more, visit the Logicalis Healthcare Solutions website at www.us.logicalis.com/healthcareit or contact us to discover how we can help you optimize your healthcare IT investments.

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© 2018 Logicalis, Inc. Logicalis is a trademark of Logicalis, Inc. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of the respective owners. 02/18

Logicalis Healthcare Solutions is the healthcare-focused arm of Logicalis US,

an international IT solutions and managed services provider. For nearly two

decades, Logicalis Healthcare Solutions has helped healthcare organizations like

yours align their business and technical needs in ways that enhance both financial

results and patient outcomes.

Because of our history in healthcare IT solutions, we understand the problems

you’re facing…and we know how to solve them. Changes ranging from electronic

regulatory requirements to decreased reimbursements are causing significant

disruptions and adjustments to healthcare business models industrywide.

Despite these changes, you need to manage your technology investments in a

way that fulfills your business needs.

To do that, you need a trusted partner with solid advice and business-driven

IT solutions that can help you evaluate and choose among a wide variety of

solutions those which will best resolve your specific business challenges and

simultaneously deliver the strongest return on investment.

At Logicalis Healthcare Solutions, the thing that sets us apart from other

companies like us is that we listen. The kind of personal attention we deliver to

our clients has earned us a reputation as their trusted advisor, and we can be that

for you too. At Logicalis, it’s not about selling you on a particular technology. It’s

about using technology and services to solve your toughest business challenges.

And that’s important...because healthcare is serious business.

To learn more, visit www.us.logicalis.com/healthcareit.

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