Advanced technologies including mobile devices and cloud services can be very helpful to increase an organization’s productivity. Yet, it all depends on the way how you use it to your advantage. For instance, you may have the right technology but it is of no use if implemented poorly. On the other hand, you can get lots of benefits from cheap technology with effective implementation.
Like every business healthcare also requires resources for digital transformation. However, sometimes using the resources for innovation may lead to neglecting other crucial aspects of healthcare IT consulting. Investing in one area at the expense of the other can damage the company’s competency and reputation. Therefore, it is absolutely important that the healthcare IT leaders must focus on initiating the value-added digital transformations.
Implementing IT managed services can help to provide the right solution for healthcare organizations. But if the solution is inadequately designed lacking a focus on the people, process, and technology, or neglecting your fundamental healthcare IT needs, it results in a failure. Your organization will be risking too much apart from not realizing the advantages of cost-cutting budgets, improved productivity and better services. For a successful implementation, it is quite significant to focus on the core healthcare IT requirements to develop strategic goals and objectives. With the following 3 steps you can have a successful IT managed services implementation for your healthcare organization:
Define your project goals:
If you are a chief information officer (CIO), it’s your responsibility to get in frontline and take initiatives rather than having an executive who comes to you and tell that he has made a new managed services contract and now it needs some expenses to get started with.
The most important thing to start your project is to define the managed services your organization needs. To maintain the balance and focus on the new project you will need to give up on the older ones and assign them to others. Of course, it’s not easy to let go of a project on which you have put your efforts and to trust someone else with it, is always difficult. But, once you have decided what you are giving up, why and how, will help you out in implementing IT managed services efficiently.
On the other hand, before you handover, your previous projects to someone else, make sure that it goes in the right hands. Moreover, when you are defining the IT managed services for your organization, make sure you have a backup plan just in case the project doesn’t deliver what you expected from it. Plan the whole project in such a way that discarding it in the middle doesn’t cause you any losses.
Be specific about your budget:
One of the most common challenges that a healthcare organization has to face during implementation of IT managed services is the budget. It is necessary to make sure that the expenses and savings of your organization are going hand-in-hand. Most of the IT projects are financed through the capital expenditures, while the managed services projects are mostly covered by operational expenses. As a result, you might observe a decrease in your CAPEX budget and an increase in your OPEX budget.
The best possible way to precisely determine the expected project budget is to get your financial leaders on-board. It is good to make everyone aware of the fact that your budget may switch from CAPEX to OPEX. Remember that it is not essentially a good or bad thing; you just need a heads up on where and how your expenses will change. You also need to make sure that everybody is on-board regarding how the IT managed services will benefit your healthcare organization.
Pursue mutual success through a partnership
The third yet most effective step is to make sure you have a strong partnership with your managed services provider (MSP). A successful partnership is the one with mutual dependency with expected outcomes and managerial interactions. If the healthcare organization successfully achieve its goals through the project so should the MSP.
Identify the metrics for success and be sure that everyone involved in the project knows what they are doing and what affects it will have on your mutual success. Keep an eye on every individual’s performance like you are supervising your own team. It’s crucial to make sure that they keep up with service levels as well as your expectations.
The project should be carried out in a collaborative way with the highest levels of responsibility. The leader of the managed services providers must work with you as an addition to your leadership team at IT. The relations that you develop, from the top managers and executives down to the ordinary employees doing the work, will affect your overall success.
- Develop a structured model.
- Execute a good communication plan.
- Manage to predict an outcome that everyone agrees to and understands.
- Measure success with well-defined metrics and data.
- Manage the project and individuals as you would manage your own department, and point everyone in a direction for success.
Implementing IT Managed Services for Healthcare
Our company’s productivity significantly increased after implementing the best staffing software, which helped us streamline our recruitment process and manage employee data efficiently. IT managed services provide a means for bringing innovation while enabling you to reduce the costs, increase efficiencies and improve care by focusing on the core competencies. But IT managed services must be implemented properly. In fact, no matter at what stage of the IT project initiatives your organization is, Virtelligence has expert consultants who can step in and provide their expertise and support for your project.
