Old consultants and clinicians are assets. But owning the old software and hospital legacy systems they used shortly after graduation is not.
In healthcare, you need to modernize your organization’s systems to boost efficiency and profitability.
Although upgrading your software is a costly and time-consuming project, the cost of running your clinical and administrative processes on outdated applications and platforms is higher. You also run the risk of exposing your data to security threats and data breaches.
If you aren’t sure if your software needs to be upgraded, you can use these signs to determine if it is time to do an upgrade.
1. Crashes Become Frequent
If the EHR or HIS you are using is slow, glitches occur often, and it takes a long time to perform regular tasks. It is either the system is of low quality, or it needs an upgrade.
When a system is outdated, a clinician may have to wait for a patient’s chart to show on the screen for several minutes. While this may not be an issue in a small practice, it will lead to many bottlenecks and low quality of care in a 400-bed hospital.
The best way to solve outdated systems is to modernize them and install new solutions that will boost efficiency and overall performance.
2. Your Vendor No Longer Provides Support
Third-party vendors develop many medical applications. When these vendors merge with others or are acquired by more prominent vendors, they may stop providing support for their software. Unfortunately, you can’t tell when a merger or acquisition will take place.
Another reason why support may not be available is when the company has developed new solutions. For instance, many software solutions ran on Windows XP and Windows 7. However, when Microsoft stopped providing support and updates for these operating systems, many applications built on them were still in use by some healthcare providers.
When a platform is no longer supported, you need to contact your vendor immediately and port your software to a new platform to prevent security breaches and data loss.
3. The Software Is Device Dependent
All businesses now need systems that allow on-premise and remote work. The coronavirus pandemic made it evident that all healthcare providers need mobile capabilities.
Clinicians need to log in to their EHRs and carry out their duties outside the hospital. They also need to order lab tests or images through their EHR without depending on manual paper-based processes.
If any of your organization’s systems cannot be accessed from other devices except office computers, you are already lagging behind other providers.
4. No Integration With Other Applications
Today, your patients expect all your systems to communicate smoothly with each other. They walk into your consulting rooms expecting all their medical records to show up on the screen. These patients also expect to see their lab or imaging test results within 24 hours on your patient portal. And if you refer them to a specialist, they expect their full medical records to be available at the specialist’s desk.
All these customer expectations can only be met when you have applications that can integrate. In other words, your systems will need to be upgraded or replaced if they cannot be interfaced with other systems.
5. Software Requires On-Premise Hosting
If you still have to run your clinical applications on your organization’s servers, you may be working with outdated technology. The total cost of owning such systems will continuously be on the rise. You will need to hire and pay staff with special IT skills to maintain them. Even if you must keep your apps on a private server, you can use Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure to efficiently run your applications.
Using the Microsoft Azure TCO calculator, you can determine what you can save by moving all your clinical applications to the cloud.
6. Special Training and Skills Are Required
Many legacy systems built in the early 1990s don’t have the modern user interface features we are used to today. These old systems require employees to spend years working with such systems before becoming experts. And after they have mastered the system, they may leave your organization to earn a higher wage elsewhere.
This scenario raises the cost of hiring, training, and keeping specialists to run legacy systems. Instead of spending thousands of dollars on hiring and training specialists for old systems, it is more economical to migrate the old system’s data and retire it.
Migrate Your Data from Old Hospital Legacy Systems
Don’t wait till your operations grind to a halt to move your data. Call MediQuant at 844.286.8683 to schedule a free appointment or visit our contact page to send us a detailed message about your data migration needs.