Automation
Automation improves productivity and helps IT teams work more efficiently. Remotely deploying a systemwide upgrade is far less disruptive to hospital operations than taking systems down manually to install patches.
“A comprehensive automation strategy is also part of the security response plan,” Fowkes says. “If you need to fix multiple Windows servers, for example, IT needs to be able to do that quickly before a hacker can get behind the firewall.”
AI Ops
ITOps increasingly uses artificial intelligence capabilities, including natural language processing and machine learning, to automate tasks and help clinicians provide better care.
The role of ITOps is to make sure that the applications running the AI continue to operate smoothly. Fowkes says that it falls to the data science team to “ensure that the AI models are harnessed correctly and don’t wander off and do something they’re not supposed to.”
READ MORE: How do managed services support healthcare providers?
Managed Services Can Further Enhance Operational Efficiencies
All of the above strategies can be further optimized with the help of managed services. Expert third-party vendors can help healthcare organizations consolidate IT services, control costs and prevent employee burnout.
“By delegating a lot of those traditional IT operation support functions to a Google or an Amazon or a Microsoft and offloading a lot of the monitoring and maintenance and upgrades to them, you find yourself with more budget and bandwidth to direct toward additional patient and physician-impacting technologies,” Bearden says.
For example, he says, HOPCo’s ITOps team has benefited from outsourcing many of its help desk needs. “We have people answering phones 24 hours a day who can remotely log in and assist clinicians,” Bearden explains. “We supplement that with our onsite experts, who are more white-glove and more visible to the practitioners. We have found that to be a successful model.”
An enterprise platform vendor can also offer comprehensive services in one package. This can spare healthcare organizations from building their own systems or managing partnerships with multiple vendors.
To ensure existing technologies are optimized to the fullest, Fowkes urges ITOps teams first to examine their processes, locate any inefficiencies and then strategize about how to improve them. “If you automate a bad process, all you achieve is doing something wrong a little faster,” he warns.
“At the end of the day, when IT systems are more efficient and the clinicians’ jobs are made easier, that ultimately benefits the patients.”
