The healthcare industry is in a constant state of evolution. While technology is improving dramatically, problems remain. Patient satisfaction is low—in the UK, 51 per cent of people are dissatisfied with the NHS. Unfortunately, healthcare resources and teams are very stretched. Healthcare organisations are doing all they can to improve their services for their patients with the tools at their disposal. The good news is that there are steps that can be taken to improve the efficiency of healthcare organisations. A particularly effective way to boost efficiency is to improve IT ageing infrastructure. In this article, we explore the benefits of improving IT infrastructure and how it boosts efficiency for healthcare organisations.
The Impact of IT System Failures
One editorial piece published in the BMJ found that in 2022, one in 10 of the largest hospital trusts in the NHS stopped working for 10 days. When systems fail, access to records is blocked, clinicians cannot order investigations, and service provision is restricted. The editorial piece states that “such failures are no longer an inconvenience but fundamentally affect our ability to deliver safe and effective care. They result in patient harm and increased costs.”
The Benefits of Upgrading IT Infrastructure
Upgrading IT infrastructure helps healthcare organisations reduce operational costs. IT infrastructure improvements not only help to optimise workflows and processes but enhance the overall efficiency of healthcare organisations. Here’s how:
Automate administrative processes
Upgrading IT infrastructure allows for the automation of repetitive but time-consuming tasks, including patient registration, billing and insurance claim processing. By automating these monotonous tasks, healthcare organisations significantly reduce the need for manual labour, training, paperwork, and the potential for human error. The result is two-fold: lower overhead costs and improved efficiency.
Better data management
Upgrading IT infrastructure also allows for better data management of sensitive information such as electronic health records and other patient data. A centralised and secure system allows healthcare providers to access and analyse patient information, removing the need for paper records. This also has the added benefit of reducing the chance of the paper document falling into the wrong hands, as long as the IT system is secure.
Upgrading infrastructure services can also encourage stronger authentication, login methods and network access. Mechanisms like multi-factoring authentication, bio-identification and role-based access control can all assist in better data management.
Increase workforce satisfaction
Aging IT infrastructure can lead to an environment where IT staff are more focused on service ticket management than strategic initiatives to improve systems. By upgrading IT infrastructure, teams spend less time working on support tickets because the system experiences fewer failures. But the impact extends beyond IT staff—a survey conducted by the BMA found that over a quarter of BMA members lose four hours a week because of inefficient systems. If this were the case for one in four NHS doctors, this would amount to at least 156,750 medical hours lost every week. Any infrastructure upgrade should be viewed as an investment and will simplify roadblocks for both healthcare specialists and IT teams.
Less downtime and maintenance
Over the last few years, 82 per cent of companies have experienced some unplanned downtime. The average cost of downtime per hour across all businesses came to $260,000. Of course, the financial impact of downtime depends on the business, but it doesn’t change the fact that downtime costs organisations dearly in money and customer (or, in this case, patient) satisfaction.
Upgrading IT infrastructure results in a more reliable system that is less prone to failures, reducing downtime and the associated costs. Investing in IT infrastructure with better longevity will also result in long-term savings for healthcare organisations, as the system will require less maintenance.
The case study below demonstrates the importance of reducing downtime.
Case Study: Evolvere builds an extensive observability monitoring platform
The client
The client is a financial-tech company that provides investment managing services focusing on systematic approach-driven investments. It has clients globally across most financial markets.
The challenge
The client had amassed a vast amount of infrastructure which required constant uptime, yet had an insufficient observability platform that could provide monitoring coverage across all services. The client’s goal was to have the maximum coverage across its services and receive alerts for downtime or performance impact on applications in order to repair quickly.
The solution
Evolvere delivered a highly scalable observability platform that the client uses for extensive monitoring of network devices and business intelligence.
Evolvere delivered the following:
Implementation of a highly resilient observability platform: Carried out the design and deployment of the collection of Clusters running on Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK).
The decoupling and rework of CI/CD tools: Identified pieces of deployment that were causing bottlenecks and issues. Refactored the process to ensure less manual involvement was required. Resulting in faster system updates and reduced downtime.
Provided DevOps support: Responding to and resolving incidents that may occur on the new systems.
The business outcome
Since having the observability platform, the client now has a centralised platform providing coverage for logs. In addition, the centralised platform offers dashboard visualisations via Elastic Kibana enabling different teams across the business to access and create custom dashboards. As a result, the teams are able to detect and respond to system downtimes promptly while also monitoring real-time data to aid decision-making.
In Summary
The healthcare sector faces numerous challenges, including increasing patient dissatisfaction, rising costs, limited resources and over-burdened staff. As the sector continues to evolve, it is vital for healthcare organisations to optimise operations by upgrading IT infrastructure. By embracing modern technology and streamlining processes, healthcare organisations can ensure they meet the needs of patients, reduce the workload of stretched staff members and create a more efficient healthcare system that continues to provide for all who need it.