If your hospital is suffering from at least two of the following pain points — because of IT service desk (help desk) issues — it’s time to review your IT support practices, procedures, service levels, and overall user satisfaction. These issues are not just painful; they can dangerously threaten the quality of your patients’ healthcare. Maybe it’s time to renovate your service desk. MORE

WHY IT MATTERS. But as the new realities of staffing challenges and value-based care become apparent – and regulatory and reimbursement policies evolve to accommodate it – more and more healthcare organizations are embracing telehealth. MORE

Three-quarters of health systems with more than 300 beds and 81 percent with fewer beds are outsourcing various IT services, according to Black Book Research. Hospitals are looking externally for a wide range of complex technology services including full IT department management and outsourcing of discrete functions such as network infrastructure, service desk, application support and legacy support as old systems are replaced with new. IT Outsourcing hospital IT outsourcin MORE

Staffing shortages have plagued the healthcare industry for years, and this year hospital IT departments are feeling more pain than ever. The shortfall in physicians and nurses understandably gets the most press attention, but two phenomenons are pushing scarcity of specialized IT workers into the stratosphere: computer and IT jobs across all industries are projected to grow 12% from 2018 to 2028, and healthcare is projected to add 3.5 MORE

Given the information technology revolution within hospitals today, how your Service Desk analysts handle physicians and other users is more critical than ever. Your Service Desk is the face of IT for your users. ITIL’s strengths: it details “what” to do. MORE

IT outsourcing is literally a very “big deal” for hospitals: it represents a significant multi-year financial investment, potentially great benefits — and certain risks. It will require numerous executive and user interviews and poring over documentation. MORE

Much has been written about the benefits of telehealth services like remote care within the healthcare system. It’s of little surprise, then, to learn that the benefits offered by remote care also extend to employee health plans. Keeping hospital admissions to a minimum. MORE

Becker’s Healthcare is pleased to release the “150 Top Places to Work in Healthcare | 2018” list, which highlights hospitals, health systems and healthcare companies that promote diversity within the workforce, employee engagement and professional growth. MORE

By any measure, superior IT departments with highly specialized staff have become an essential factor in the success of today’s healthcare industry. As this group continues to age it will need ever more care—and that means healthcare will need more workers. MORE

While it’s great news that healthcare jobs will be among the fastest growing through 2026, the plethora of jobs is a double-edged sword. The projected supply of qualified workers will not fill the demand, and as any hospital CIO can attest, the shortage of qualified workers in healthcare IT is nearly as worrisome as the growing paucity of clinical professionals. Healthcare support occupations (23.6 MORE

The healthcare IT job outlook is currently a maze of contradictions. Some good news: healthcare is driving jobs growth more than most industry sectors, at the rate of 35 thousand+ jobs per month so far in 2018. Many of these are healthcare IT jobs. Bad news: It is increasingly difficult to find high quality IT talent with expert levels of healthcare knowledge. Meantime, our 77 million baby boomers are deluging our healthcare providers. MORE

In a panel this past week at the HIMSS Connected Health Conference in Boston, Dr. John Halamka, international healthcare innovation professor at Harvard Medical School, and four other telehealth experts tried to arrive at a definition of just what telehealth is. After some discussion, Halamka settled on a phrase: "technology-enabled healthcare writ large." " It's a word, he said, that "has come, and is going to disappear. "It's a tool. MORE

Given the information technology revolution within hospitals today, how your Service Desk analysts handle physicians and other users is more critical than ever. Your Service Desk is the face of IT for your users. If the Service Desk is lacking, the entire IT department will be seen as lacking. Let’s talk about preventing this ugly scenario and making you and your IT staff heroes. ITIL’s strengths: it details “what” to do. IT Service Desk hospital service desk MORE

So, handing over a suddenly uncooperative or erratic laptop to your hospital’s IT staff for repairs — whether physically or through remote intervention — can be unnerving and for some of us, close to panic producing. We know something insidious is going on inside that laptop, but we don’t want an outsider to muck it up even more — or put us through frustrating days of confusion and non-productivity. And it easily can. Sad but true. MORE