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By: Rob Wildman
Most small-and medium-sized businesses add technology piece by piece to serve specific needs – networks, wireless systems, cloud services, and business-specific applications.
It’s the same for medical practices. Scheduling applications. Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems as required by state and federal laws. Advanced phone systems. And all of it supported by workstations, connectivity, routing, and switching, not to mention maintenance, upgrades and security.
One of our clients, a long-established healthcare practice found itself in this situation when the practice administrator approached Matrix Integration to help streamline and simplify its technology.
The complexity kept adding up, along with costs. Technology would break. Connections would go down. And it would impact everyone in the practice, along with patients.
A New Approach to Health Practice Technology Services
The majority of healthcare practices have anywhere from 10 to 40 people who work in the practice, so it doesn’t make financial sense to have a full-time technology administrator on-site. At the same time, like in our client’s case, it’s not efficient for the practice administrator to be in charge of technology. Anything that districts the administrator from their job negatively impacts the practice and the bottom line.
With our healthcare client, and with many of our clients moving forward, we took the viewpoint that technology needs to be a predictable utility, just like water, power and phone lines. It needs to be always-on, just like a pad and paper were “always on” 20 years ago.
MiAssurance allows medical practices to enjoy that kind of productivity. Our client described it as if the practice had “hired an entire IT department at a fraction of the cost,” which is how MiAssurance operates.
With a MiAssurance agreement, Matrix Integration supports your IT Infrastructure and systems for a flat fee which increases if you add employees, or decreases if you reduce them.
We provide those “utility” IT services for your practice, such as:
- 24/7 network monitoring for uptime and security issues
- Keeping systems up to date, both hardware and software
- Providing help desk services for employee questions and issues
Because we have a number of healthcare clients, we are open to signing a Business Associate Agreement, which includes extending the clients’ liability and responsibility of having access to private patient information. Our help desk has received HIPPA and other training relevant to healthcare clients, so when we receive a call from a health practice, safeguards are in place to ensure confidentiality.
Our MiAssurance agreements are flexible. A general practice doesn’t have the same technology as an oncology practice, which might need the capability to transfer much greater amounts of data, as an example. We also know that practices grow, shrink, or expand to new locations, and we work alongside our clients as they make these changes.
In the end, we see our job as making your job easier, and often saving you money. The amount you save will vary, but our Pediatric Healthcare client estimated savings of about 20 percent annually. And you’ll definitely save time and headaches, while operating much more efficiently.
As a healthcare practice, what would you do differently if you didn’t have to worry about the health of your technology? Contact us to learn more.
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