Managing a healthcare organization often means meeting the demands of hundreds, or even thousands, of patients, while simultaneously working with a variety of specialists, insurance companies, pharmaceutical organizations, and numerous departments — including administration, billing and finance, HR, IT, and more. In an age where money is tight and government regulations are even tighter, it’s hard to find a way to make all the separate ends meet in the middle.

A managed service provider can take a considerable chunk of these responsibilities off your plate. You’ll be able to cut costs and improve services, without adding to the complexity of your organization. In fact, managed IT services significantly reduce that complexity, so that your facility runs more smoothly without adding to staff or investing in even more hardware and software. Here are some of the best benefits of partnering with a managed service provider.

1. Put Your Focus Back on Your Patients

How often do you have to tell your patients “our systems are down”? When a healthcare facility takes on their own IT infrastructure, it leads to downtime, meaning your workers are scurrying around trying to fix things that are broken and do all their processes manually, instead of focusing on what matters: patient care. Managed IT services means you can stop worrying about broken systems and resume caring for your patients.

(To learn more about how managed IT services eliminates the problems of running your own IT department, get your complimentary copy of Greg Hanna’s book ‘Computers Should Just Work!’.)

2. Save Money

Investing in enough servers to store all of your patient data — including medical histories, insurance information, billing information, etc. — takes a tremendous amount of data storage. If you do this onsite, it can run into the tens of thousands of dollars quickly, not including the manpower, time, software, maintenance, power bills, and other resources it takes to keep those servers and equipment running. Switch all of that offsite with a managed service provider, and you’ll eliminate all those ongoing costs forever.

3. Offer Your Patients More Services

Many patients actually prefer making their appointments and managing their accounts online. With a managed service provider, you can establish a patient portal, allowing your patients to log into the portal online, make appointments, pay their bills, and even fill out pre-appointment paperwork, thereby significantly reducing the amount of manual paperwork and data entry your admin staff has to do. This also cuts down on errors, because there is no mis-entering the information or misreading the patient’s handwriting.

4. Manage HIPAA Compliance Easier

HIPAA compliance means regular data backups, which can be hard to do when patients are piled up in the waiting room and the patient rooms are spilling over. A managed service provider can assume the responsibilities for regular backups, helping keep your organization within HIPAA compliance.

Running a healthcare facility is, in many ways, much like running any other small business, only you have to add the layer of complexity involved in managing patients. To learn more about how these services can benefit your healthcare facility, download the white paper: Managed IT Services For Small Businesses.