Healthcare Information Technology
Balancing Efficiency and Patient Care

Healthcare information technology has become the prime function in helping to achieve the proper balance between delivering excellent patient care and maximizing staff efficiency within the healthcare industry.

Therefore you must be diligent in choosing functions to outsource as well in choosing your potential vendor. Outsourcing IT systems to a professional IT service provider would introduce best practice solutions.

You want healthcare information technology solutions that will improve service levels throughout the organization. As a senior executive looking to get involved in IT project outsourcing, where do you stand?

Some Important Questions To Ask

• How and where will the work we give to you be completed? How much of it will be subcontracted and to where?
• Who will be performing this work and how much are they paid?
• You need to see what policies, procedures and training programs are in place and do they follow the HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act)standards, especially for security and privacy.
• What laws govern the protection of personal information in the locations where this work will be performed?
• How will the work be securely transported to and from our facility?
• How long will any patient information reside on contractor's databases and how will it be destroyed?
• How does the vendor ensure and measure quality and what reports will we receive?
• You need to see their contracts to verify how responsibility for breaches of privacy and security are handled.
• Review how your vendor is performing in other healthcare/vendor relationships. Is he implementing projects on time and on budget?
• Ask the vendor to prove his staff have the proper credentials, and are well trained.
• Ask how he plans to ensure confidentiality and security of the information they handle.
• Does he appear to be flexible in his approach or is he rigidly trying to force you to implement practices that are not part of the healthcare organizations needs?
• Does he have a good and well tested disaster resource plan to prevent loss of data? This is of utmost importance in healthcare information technology.

Outsourcing Coding Systems

HIPAA mandates that vendor computer system be protected from unauthorized access. You need to know if your vendor's coding staff are working from home. If so, these issues need to be covered:

• The coding related work must be the sole function of that computer, no other Internet access and exposure to viruses is allowed.
• Regulate Internet access through routers that have built-in firewall protection.
• Employees must be restricted from downloading any personal software onto this computer.
• Coders are not allowed to print, screen capture, or transmit data from their computers to another computer other than back to the hospital or vendor's computers.
• After the hospital data has been coded, it cannot be stored on the computer's hard drive or any other personal media.

Remote coders need to be evaluated on these criteria:

• How your data is captured, transferred, stored and accessed.
• Type of encryption method used.
• Firewall controls, audit controls and reporting.
• Physical security of all hardware used.
• Methods of disaster recovery.
• Confidentiality.

Outsourcing Physician Order Entry (POE)

Healthcare organizations need to reduce the potential for medical errors by completely automating medical records processing and POE. It is estimated that by installing these systems it could save two hours of work on a nurse's shift, which would translate into more time for patient care.

Adopting these healthcare information technology systems in ambulatory care would eliminate approximately two million adverse drug events and up to 190,000 hospitalizations a year.

Outsourcing Billing Systems

Remember, automating an inefficient system does not improve it. Business expertise is essential to resolve all the underlying problems, especially in healthcare information technology.

Billing functions need to be a combination of in-house and outsourced functions. Patients need to be able to discuss their bills with someone in-house and not the outsourced vendor.

Outsourcing Clinical Systems

• Are your IT systems out of date?
• Is your IT department struggling to meet day-to-day deadlines?
• Do you have high turnover? Is lower than normal salaries an issue?

If these are a number of your healthcare information technology issues, then seriously look at IT outsourcing if you really want to make an impact on the delivery of quality patient care.

Looking to Get Started?

1. Obtain clinical staff buy-in needs as a priority. What is your staff's satisfaction with the existing systems? Get their input as to what is needed for improvements as they are the ones to benefit the most from this process.
2. Then put together a transition plan because clinicians are very concerned about the tools and information they need, so a good place to start is outsourcing your IT infrastructure and the maintenance of all systems that are currently running smoothly.
3. Starting with this type of plan helps to minimize disruption while generating some quality benefits.
4. Make sure you're selecting a provider that is skilled in IT Management and has transitioned key operations in the past.
5. The ideal partner must have IT skills in the healthcare industry and be knowledgeable in HIPAA.
6. He must have the technical skills to run these systems as well as understand how these systems fit into the healthcare business model.
7. He must be capable of providing a full range of services - IT support, maintenance, applications development, integration, business process outsourcing and document management.

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