In this episode, Nathan Sirois from Balsam Technologies talks about managed IT for healthcare and medical practices. He covers patient care concerns, HIPAA responsibilities, cybersecurity awareness, backup planning, and vendor coordination for specialized healthcare systems.
John Maher: Hi, I’m John Maher. I’m here today with Nathan Sirois, Support Engineer at Balsam Technologies, a managed IT services company based in Gloucester, Massachusetts, offering cybersecurity, IT infrastructure, network support, cloud migrations, data backup, and more. Today, we’re talking about managed IT for healthcare and medical practices. Welcome, Nathan.
Nathan Sirois: Hey, John. Thanks for having me.
IT Downtime and Patient Care
John: Absolutely. Nathan, how are the consequences of an IT problem different in a healthcare environment where an unavailable electronic health record, a scheduling system, or a practice management platform can interfere with patient care?
Nathan: It can really be critical in healthcare environments where systems go down. Like you said, John, it’s directly impacting patient care. You might not be able to pull up a record that you need right when you’re on the phone with a vendor trying to call in medication for them. You can be scheduling their next operation or procedure and just not have access to the files you need. You could have your device break out of nowhere and be down for a large portion of the day just because you didn’t have your staff maintaining your equipment.
And having a managed service provider in place that knows your systems and knows where the shortcomings could end up being, how to solve problems quickly, it’s really paramount to keeping your patient care up and running at all times. And it’s just needed in this day and age.
Patients today, there’s a lot of different medical nuances that are available in the market and having a managed service provider that can both assist you with your organization and the practices that have been done for decades and the newest equipment that is available in the industry is really essential for your organization to run smoothly.
HIPAA Compliance and Patient Data Access
John: Healthcare and medical practices obviously have to deal with HIPAA requirements for privacy of medical records and things like that. How can medical practices meet HIPAA responsibilities and protect their patient information while still giving clinicians and administrative employees fast, convenient access to the records that they need in order to do their jobs?
Nathan: When dealing with HIPAA compliance, it comes down to both ensuring that your systems are properly protected so that your data’s never going to be stolen, whether it be the client records, it could be the financial systems for your organization that somebody could gain access to, to as simple as just making sure that your staff is trained on not sharing documents on accident. It could be as simple as somebody shoulder surfing over next to you at a desk and they’re viewing a document that they shouldn’t have, whether it be another staff member or just a patient walking by your nurse’s station.
So making sure that your staff really understands the severity and weight of those compliance standards that your organization is subject to and how to maintain those properly is really important for keeping your organization compliant and running smoothly.
Cybersecurity Threats for Medical Practices
John: What cybersecurity threats are most common for small and mid-sized medical practices? And why is employee awareness an important part of protecting patient data?
Nathan: With so much interaction with the end patient in smaller healthcare organizations, phishing scams and ransomware attacks are often the first thing that hackers go to, to try and compromise your organization. They could impersonate a local person that you know and have worked with for a number of years, and you would never suspect that they would mean any harm to your organization. And in fact, they don’t, but the hackers do, and they know that a lot of small healthcare practices can be crippled by a simple ransomware attack.
So making sure that your systems are protected, that you’re aware of those threats that come up against your organization, and that you’re always alert for areas that your organization can improve its cybersecurity posture is really important to be able to look into yourselves. And if you need assistance ever with those requirements and updating your systems, managed service providers like Balsam are always available to provide you with the top auditing and security systems that are possible in this day and age when there are so many threats to protect your organization.
Backup and Disaster Recovery for Healthcare
John: And what should a healthcare backup and disaster recovery plan cover in order to ensure that patient records, scheduling, billing, and other essential operations like that can be restored quickly in the event that they go down?
Nathan: In a healthcare setting where so much stuff is time sensitive on your day-to-day, it’s really important to have a backup system in place for your organization that both maintains the records that you have and keeps your systems up and running.
Having redundant systems in place can often be extremely helpful as well, whether that be additional hardware at your organization that is keeping those same files, or if it’s just simply another vendor that you use in tandem with your platforms to keep things running smoothly.
It’s just really important to analyze the infrastructure that’s in place and making sure that just because of one IT hiccup, your organization is not going to be crippled for your day.
Managing Healthcare Software and Vendors
John: And how does IT management become more complicated when a practice might rely on some specialized healthcare software or specialized equipment and outside vendors?
Nathan: In those cases, John, it’s really important that you have somebody who’s able to uniformly manage all of the vendors that you’re working with and able to get support on your systems that you’re actively using, maybe even on your patients. Not having a managed service provider in place like that, that is able to both understand the full scope of all the services you provide and which vendors are being utilized and when, is really important to have in your back pocket whenever you need assistance with issues that arise.
While all of these issues might not necessarily be directly, technically, related, if you can’t work with a vendor reliably for your healthcare practice, it’s important that you have an IT provider in place that can assist you with either determining better vendors to use or how to optimize the performance of the current systems that you have in place.
John: All right, well, that’s really great information, Nathan. Thanks again for speaking with me today.
Nathan: Thank you, John.
John: And for more information, you can visit the Balsam Technologies website at balsamtechnologies.com or call 978-281-3339.
