WAKE TSI

Actual Value in After Hours IT Support

2020-10-26T19:19:40Z

The pleasurable things that we experience in life are often not tied to the specific action themselves, but rather the hidden benefits. These are the things that we are truly seeking. The encounters that make our brain flood with dopamine and undergo a sense of enjoyment. Think of your favorite activity that you enjoy on your downtime. Maybe it’s running, reading, writing, watching TV, driving, surfing — you name it. The actual mechanics of that activity may be enjoyable, but it is really the feeling that we glean from the activity that tells us that we need to come back for more. Let’s take running for example. Running can be challenging and often strenuous if you are pushing yourself. While some certainly enjoy this challenge, it is really the feeling of accomplishment and the “runner’s high” that we get that makes us feel great afterwards. This often creates an entire running habit that makes us want to feel this way again and again.

I would speculate that procuring outsourced after hours IT support for organizations is related. Certainly not as attractive or as enjoyable a topic as your favorite activity, but when done right the real advantages offer a feeling of balance. A sense of homeostasis in your work culture. The actual benefit of the activity is not that calls get answered in a timely manner. That is the agreed upon work that is typically boring and monotonous. The real benefit of outsourcing after hours help desk support is a work life balance for your internal IT department. Your staff gets to enjoy more time with their loved ones, and not being tied to there phones often stuck in a Pavlovian conditioned response which is the standard reality of being on-call 24/7. This creates a happier IT work culture that permeates across the organization and ultimately leads to better end user satisfaction.

Think about it… when that rude & annoying contractor (who was instructed 3 times already to call the help desk a week ahead of time to setup remote access) calls the help desk Monday morning at 8:30am (their start date) and demands to know why remote access hasn’t been set up on their device, your staff is content to help in a calm demeanor vs. contemplating where they will work next (or getting into it with the contractor… maybe both). Now outsourcing this support isn’t the magic bullet that keeps IT staff eternally happy but it does help to lead to IT employee longevity. I’ve heard it directly from multiple CIOs in our client base. It works.

When internal IT staff stay longer, the organization saves money on employee turnover costs, proprietary knowledge loss, and culture shifts. Sure, someone else to answer the phones at 10pm is an obvious wish for most internal IT staff. But when internal IT staff feel that they can balance their work life with their personal life, the benefits are invaluable. By giving them the after hours coverage assistance, your organization is helping to build a foundation of appreciation and positivity that helps the organization as a whole get better. It no longer becomes a want but a need for the organization when they understand these benefits. So with most things in life it is important to look at the underlying and often intangible benefits that create incremental changes.

What are your thoughts? How does your organization keep your IT staff happy in work/life balance?

New WAKE TSI Website

2019-11-08T20:57:50Z

Welcome to the new WAKE TSI website. Check back frequently for updates.

Getting Ready to Buy a Server? WHY???

2019-05-30T16:48:21Z

I had the radio on for background noise and a commercial came on from a local IT services company touting that they will build servers for small businesses. I was sure that I misheard the commercial and waited for it to be replayed. I heard it correctly. They were indeed targeting the small business community to build them servers.

This is wrong on so many levels.

I’m sure they are competent and can deliver on their claims but what came to mind immediately is WHY SHOULD ANY SMALL BUSINESS HAVE THEIR OWN SERVER ONSITE?

Do they have a proper place to house it? NO! It will end up under a desk or in a closet. Not in a clean, climate controlled data center with stable cooling and power, including emergency power.
Do they have the staff to support it? NO! Small businesses are already running lean so it falls on a staff member as a secondary responsibility. Or worse, it is ignored. Servers require a certain level of care and feeding.
Do they have the security personnel on staff to protect it? NO! These are expensive and very specialized people that small businesses cannot afford to retain.

We have built a lot of data centers, servers, storage farms, networks, security, operational procedures and everything else that goes into operating a best practice computing environment. We would NEVER recommend a small business try to own and operate its own server farm. Why do you want to be in the data center business if it’s not your core business focus?

Over the last 20 years, we have laid out a strategic roadmap for our clients. In the early days, it started with them operating a data center built on best practices to maximize their stability and uptime. Then came colocation which alleviated the facilities burden for the organizations and provided a higher level of power and cooling stability – It’s expensive to build and operate a Tier III data center. This then morphed into managed services which setup the leap to the cloud.

Every business large or small needs computing services. There has never been a time when we have had this many options for getting these computing services. In today’s environment, you can look at:

Hosted SaaS options

Managed cloud services

Collocating your own servers

Build your own data center, build your own servers, operate your own servers

Before you jump into the deep end of the pool, make sure you understand what you are getting into. Do the financial analysis. Be an educated consumer and take into account:

The cost of building and maintaining a proper computing environment (or data center)
The cost of building and operating a server farm including storage
The FTE costs for the above
The future costs of equipment refresh every 3 – 5 years
The cost of downtime to your business

We have the financial modeling tools on hand to show you what this looks like. Understand your options and what they really cost. Why dump money into something that is not the core of your business and then put your business at risk when it fails? We can help.

Security: You can’t just check the boxes

2019-05-30T16:48:45Z

Organizations rely on safety nets to protect their bottom line from a catastrophic event. The healthcare industry is no different. Security breaches are becoming more rampant and, due to government regulations, expensive to address in their aftermath. To protect themselves, organizations are taking out liability insurance policies to help defer the costs when a data breach occurs.

One problem…

The policy and associated premium are based on questionnaires or self-assessments completed by the covered organization. What happens if you inadvertently or willfully misrepresent your security posture? Take a look at this story at Healthcare IT News. Don’t think it can happen to you? Think again. Insurance companies make money by not having to pay claims. You better have your ducks in a row.

Rather than just checking the boxes on the form, develop a comprehensive security plan that is properly supported with policies, procedures, and monitoring. It doesn’t take a room full of FTEs to do this effectively. Careful adherence to your plan and strategically employing various technologies and automation, will not only help protect your organization against the bad guys, but will also ensure you are in compliance with your insurance obligations.

Don’t be naive about your security posture. You are under constant attack. Go out and get help from a third party (like us!) if you cannot do it yourself.

Unified Secure Communications

2019-05-30T16:48:58Z

Here is a good discussion on the topic of Unified Clinical Communications. Check out the article. We’ve been integrating communication solutions in hospital settings for years and Dr. Schmuland is dead-on. One thing I would add to his article is “Secure” and I’ll touch on that.

The technology itself is relatively easy. The critical items are integration and adoption. If you don’t integrate the solution, all you have is a phone or text messaging platform. Nice but it will fall far short of its potential. Why not integrate your communications platform into your EMR(s), nurse call, alarm management, patient tracking and transport, physician on-call, consult notification, case management, and the list goes on. There are substantiated benefits, including financial, in broad based integration. This is also where security is critical. You are going to pass PHI through this communication platform. That’s what the clinicians want. They want to be able to share important patient data among the care team without having to worry about securing it. BTW – Don’t think it is happening? It’s naive to think physicians are not using text messaging on their personal phones to communicate.

The other item is adoption. A fully integrated system is useless unless it is used. This has proven to be the time consuming part of any implementation. People hate change. We understand that. They will not adopt it immediately. However, once they start using a well-design and implemented system, they come around quickly. It takes a lot of training, listening, and hand holding followed by regular rounding.

It’s a wonderful thing to see when it is done correctly.

Congratulations Reading Hospital @ReadingHosp

2019-06-20T16:27:10Z

Everyone at WAKE TSI would like to congratulate the Reading Health System (RHS) team for their Outstanding Achievement Award from the Interactive Media Council.

We are exceptionally proud that the Internet and Intranet projects were managed by one of our Senior Project Managers. This is just one real world example of how we put into practice our strong project management methodologies and skills.

Real project management is more than just checking the boxes!

Vendors Are Waking Up

2019-06-20T16:27:43Z

Finally!!! Vendors are waking up – There are tangible, measurable benefits to HIPAA compliant, secure communications. They all promote their features but have left it up to the hospitals to figure out the payback. Who wants to dump significant dollars into an enterprise solution without knowing the potential upside?

WAKE TSI works with all the major secure communications vendors. In this case, our friends at TigerText have published a use case paper that include benefits. Check it out here. We have seen these types of benefits realized by our clients.

However, I think they missed a few benefits like completely removing pagers from the environment along with their inherent security issues and recurring costs; Getting rid of two-way radios; and Reducing clinical alarm fatigue. And it’s more than that. A well developed secure communication strategy will look at more than doctors sending texts to one another. You need to evaluate every communication workflow in the organization to see if efficiencies can be gained.

Optimized Workflow = Cost Savings!

Let us help show you the benefits you can gain through a HIPAA Compliant, Secure Communication Strategy.

The Practice Dilemma – Reimbursements and Technology

2019-06-20T16:31:32Z

Physician practices of all sizes are currently feeling the squeeze of dwindling reimbursements. The conundrum of receiving reimbursements is related primarily to hassles with payers, prior authorizations, and government red tape (Medical Economics). To put it bluntly, a significant number of practices are receiving less money to provide the same services. These providers are forced to see more patients while continuing to focus on the quality of care being administered. This is quite a daunting task.

If you have doubts about the reality of this climate, just ask your local physician. I’m sure they would be more than happy to share their viewpoint.

In order to embrace these changes and adapt to the increasing pressures, it is an excellent time for practices to begin looking at the tools necessary to drive greater efficiencies. With increased stresses placed on the physician practice, the practice staff has less time to worry about maintaining the technology tools that their practice needs to be successful. Printers, PC’s, EMR systems, Internet Service, Servers, Phones, Networks, Security – These IT infrastructure components of a practice are often viewed as necessary burdens, and rarely used to their full potential. When properly configured, supported, and adopted, technology can provide a significant positive impact to the bottom line of a practice. More than ever, providers need to alleviate the stress of technology and focus on what they do best – practicing medicine. It is not logical to expect a practice’s billing manager, office manager, provider, or any staff members to attend to items outside of their expertise when their focus should be on running the practice and providing quality health care to their patients.

We can’t treat patients, but we are experts in the necessary Information Technology that practices need. Let us show you how WAKE TSI can help.

The Happiness of Project Success !

2019-06-20T16:31:21Z

About a month ago I hired a consultant to help me move my email from one PC to another, which involved a number of steps, including upgrading to another email system, combining files, and ensuring more than one email site was downloading to a single ‘pull’ source correctly, etc.

My topic is: WHY did I hire the consultant, rather than doing the work myself?

I had all of the components to do it myself:

I had “Live Mail”.
I had the skill set and knowledge.
I certainly had the will.

but, I DIDN’T have the time.

The project was completed in short order, and very satisfactorily, albeit with an appropriate consultant’s fee.

And while I was happy to have completed the project, the surprising thing was what I experienced over the next few weeks. The satisfaction that I have been experiencing has literally changed my every day.

Mind you, this was a project that had been sitting on my ‘to-do’ list for years, so as expected, there was certainly satisfaction stemming from simply reducing my list.

Moreover, I was dealing with a cumbersome process of dealing with two PC’s and two email systems for a very long time. And in running the project through my mind many times, I kept coming up with areas of concern, and some pieces where I lacked the right knowledge. Which in itself, had me always relegating the project to a lower priority on my to-do list.

So, over the years….yes, sorry to say, that long….I had lost the vision of the EFFECT of having this task accomplished, that would result from an improvement in a process I undertook multiple times every day.

Now, literally every time I’m getting my personal email, I am full of the FEELING that the improved process has brought, which is surprisingly satisfying.

OK, by now you probably get my point, and where I’m going with this.

As consultants, I often wonder why our prospects don’t hire us on the spot….

I know we can help immediately
And I’m convinced that executives have the same intuition – that there are many consultants out there that could probably help them.
AND, I’m very sure that simply because of a basic human trait, there’s a laundry list of ‘to-do’s that is sitting on every one of our prospect’s minds.

Maybe it’s simply the old gimmick of having to get a round TUIT. (Remember those?) But I don’t think so.

Certainly it’s about believing that we need to stick to the priority list, and if that nagging item down the list never reaches the top, so be it. Even if it’s a Bio-Med device / EMR Integration, or some other facet of EMR Integration like Nurse Call, or having an independent evaluation of your IT Strategy, or ….the list is long, isn’t it?

However, I submit the following:
That getting the simpler items dealt with and off the list….especially those that can have impact way beyond what it takes to get them resolved….will have a MOST satisfying effect. WHY? Sense of accomplishment?, One less thing to worry about?, Crossed one off the to-do list?, Yep, sure. But I believe it’s the anticipation and continued future use of the new process that really is the thing. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. Every time we see the new process’s effect, we know the impact, and it’s palpable. We actually Feel it.

So, the WAKE message?: We can really, really, have an effect on your well-being!

Dwindling Reimbursements

2019-06-20T16:31:12Z

Combat the 800 LB Gorilla in the Room Smarter and Harder

The saying “time equals money” has never applied more to the small-medium sized physician practice than at this particular time in history. Especially with the passing of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Physicians are complaining about shrinking reimbursement rates (rightfully so) and the physician practice is having to treat an increased amount of patients in the same amount of office time. Practices need to provide quality care to their patients while being concerned about their bottom line. This means that their billable hours must go up and the level of care must not suffer.

Quite a daunting task

If you have doubts about this just ask your local physician if you need further explanation!

With increased stresses in the healthcare practice space, the practice staff does not have time to worry about maintaining their IT infrastructure. At the same time technology is driving the future of the healthcare world.

Outsourcing the IT environment to an expert healthcare IT company is a way that physician practices can ensure that their mission critical systems are operating at full functionality and that they will not have to deal with technology issues when they occur. There is one thing that we can count on with technology … at some point in time, it will break, malfunction, or cost us time (and money). In order to ensure that these systems are operating in the most effective manner they should be architected, designed, and maintained by an IT entity with years of experience. And when things do go wrong they should not have to waste the practice staff’s valuable time fixing them.

A new business support model is here!