Why Healthcare Orgs Need to Take a Practice-Centered Approach to IT

Healthcare IT is different from IT for other industries. You know it, and we know it. That’s why MTS takes a practice-centered approach to healhcare IT that is unique in the industry.

MTS CEO Mona Abutaleb covers this topic in an article that was the top story for HealthITConsultant. In it, Mona discusses “a new approach to IT that aligns the deployment of systems and technologies with the fundamental tenet of patient-centered care – the guiding principle of reform embraced by governments, hospitals, physicians, and insurers.”

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Over the past year, we’ve all witnessed the dramatic impact that healthcare IT had on both the selfless clinicians who power our health systems and their patients. The Covid-19 crisis accelerated innovation and led to increased adoption of the cloud and telehealth technologies that helped organizations continue to provide care no matter where they or their patients were.

However, several shortfalls were just as apparent. The 2020 HIMSS Healthcare Cybersecurity Survey found that 70 percent of healthcare organizations experienced a security incident in 2020. Many of these involved ransomware attacks that put patients’ personal health data at risk, and jeopardized the ability of practices to access systems and provide care. Physicians and nurses also still spend far too much time on administrative tasks, whether in the form of paperwork or clicking through screens as a result of electronic health record (EHR) implementations that digitized manual tasks but did little to simplify them.

Healthcare organizations and providers need a new approach to IT that aligns the deployment of systems and technologies with the fundamental tenet of patient-centered care – the guiding principle of reform embraced by governments, hospitals, physicians, and insurers. As an example, patient data must be secure not only to satisfy data protection guidelines but also because such protection is crucial so physicians can use the data to inform and manage courses of treatment.

In much the same way, manual administrative tasks should be eliminated not only because they save money, but more importantly, so healthcare professionals have more time to focus on patients. Requiring a doctor to click through multiple screens on a tablet takes their focus away from patients in the same way that paperwork does.

This new approach – a practice-centered approach to IT services – requires healthcare IT and business leaders to focus on four key aspects of the solutions they deploy.

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