If you have a sizable clinic, then chances are that you need IT support to keep everything going smoothly. In case you do not have qualified IT experts working for you already, be it in-house or outsourced, here are a few reasons that will make you reconsider.
Compliance with the HIPAA Standards
Dental clinics, just like every other healthcare facility operating within the jurisdictions of the United States, must adhere to applicable regulations as mandated by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and specifically, the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act. Doing so, however, is not easy, even though you are most likely quite familiar with the basic tenets of HIPAA. Not only are the compliance factors highly complicated in terms of their application to various instances, but the regulations also keep changing frequently.
You are either painfully aware of all that already, or perhaps you are being non-compliant with the new standards without even having any idea regarding where the noncompliance issues are originating from! If it is the former, then it is inevitable that the clinic is losing time and money by constantly trying to maintain their HIPAA compliance, and if it is the latter, then an audit and the consequent hefty fines are inevitable. Neither of the two situations is ideal of course, and they can be avoided easily with the help of a service like Healthy IT. This dental IT company will streamline the clinic’s operations, secure patient data with the HIPAA mandates, and ensure that the clinic’s data security protocols are in sync with the latest changes made by the HIPAA, if and when they do make them.
Data Loss Prevention: Backup and Recovery
Be it due to malware corrupting all local patient files, a team of hackers gaining access to the data with ransomware, or simply because the local server in your clinic crashed; compromised data can lead to financial, legal and diagnostic losses. When you have a competent dental IT team on your side, they will be taking all the necessary precautions to prevent any of that from happening, or at the very least, letting any of that affect the clinic’s daily operations. With HIPAA-compliant protocols in place, all necessary data will be backed up regularly onto encrypted cloud storage servers. If anything does happen, your dental IT team will clean the system, close the security gap (when applicable) and simply download everything from the secured servers for a complete recovery.
Streamlining Operations to Make It a More Profitable and Care-Centric Establishment
If you have a dental clinic, then it would be borderline impossible for the clinic to not have a main software system with multiple, integrated software tools. While anyone can learn to use the applications with time, you need experienced health IT experts to maintain, secure and streamline the collective system in a way, so that the dental clinic can run more efficiently. You and your staff will be able to concentrate solely on improving the quality of patient care, while your IT team will handle everything non-clinical to keep that workflow uninterrupted.
Working with a quality dental IT team will make sure that there is always someone you can call up to solve any problems related to IT. However, the best dental IT service providers will ensure that there are a few problems as possible, and the need to call them up is minimal, to begin with.
