IT Support for the Healthcare Sector
Working in the healthcare sector can be accompanied by untold satisfaction, with the delight felt each time a patient’s life is made better. Managing all of these patients in today’s modern world can be tricky, and usually includes a mountain of information and details that must be kept safe and organized in order to ensure each patient receives the proper care.
As with most areas of business these days, technology has become an integral part of how most medical practices function, allowing a degree of safety and efficiency not available in times past. In order to make sure these critical systems are continuously operating at peak efficiency, a knowledgeable and experienced team of professionals is needed. Network Depot is proud to offer these services to medical practices in and around the DC Metro region.
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Meeting HIPAA-HITECH Requirements
If your company is involved with the use or management of personal health information for individuals, you are required to follow HIPAA’s strict security guidelines to protect their medical and financial information. The Network Depot blog post below gives you useful information about HIPAA and HITECH. It provides a background of HIPAA and HITECH and its new requirements and auditing power, details the cost of non-compliance, and recommends actions any health care company or business associate should take to remain HIPAA-compliant and avoid penalties.
What Your Company Needs to Know about HIPAA and HITECH
Flat Fee Excellence
One of the mandates at the very center of our support and service philosophy is the belief that each company should be able to know for certain how much IT support will cost for normal instances on an ongoing basis. Since an hourly fee can fluctuate greatly, Network Depot strongly identifies with a flat rate, quoted at the beginning of our contract, and applicable to all services we perform. Never worry again that sudden expenditures will rear their ugly head without warning, potentially putting your business into a vulnerable financial position.
Network Depot Services
The number of services available from Network Depot is high, with several specific solutions suited for many members of the medical practice community.
Backup and Recovery
The charts, notes, and data for each patient at a medical practice are the lifeblood on which it runs successfully. Losing this information can be catastrophic, which means that having a comprehensive backup solution is mandatory. The OneStepAhead’s Backup and Disaster Recovery system used here at Network Depot is second to none, and performs backup operations every 15 minutes. This ensures that you have the most current data if the unthinkable ever takes place.
Backup is only half of this equation, with the equally-important job of recovery right up there as well in terms of importance. If a server fails, it can normally take hours or days to have everything back up and functioning normally, an extreme difficulty for any medical practice. The system we employ, called the Backup/Disaster Recovery Device, can actually step in and act as the server itself, providing a seamless transition from one piece of tech to the other. This means that you are up and running completely while your primary system gets fixed.
Cloud Services vs. Dedicated Server
One critical IT decision your company has to make is where to store your Email, files, and business applications and how you can most effectively access these functions. Your decision in each case will be one of the following: using a dedicated server, using a cloud solution, or using a hybrid solution.
Whether you run a small medical practice or something considerably larger, having your own server and tech equipment on site can be difficult to operate and maintain without a dedicated IT staff. One of the most popular choices for virtually any kind of business today is the cloud, which allows all of the technical capabilities of having your own equipment, without the worry of it malfunctioning or breaking altogether.
The list of different and applicable solutions that the cloud can provide are countless, with many of them perfect for medical practices. Valuable suites of software, such as Microsoft Office 365 and Skydrive, are accessible in full with a cloud setup. Email exchanges, virtual server hosting, cloud backups, and cloud file hosting and sharing are all services that can be greatly beneficial to you and your medical practice.
The following articles explain the pros and cons of each method and will help your company make the decision that works best for your unique needs.
Not All Clouds are Created Equal
Business Applications- Server vs. Cloud
Network Security
Making sure that your patient information and data is kept safe from outside interlopers can be just as critical to the success of a medical practice as making sure it is not lost. Hackers, and other nefarious characters can seek to root out sensitive information to use for a variety of illicit purposes. Network Depot protects your network from unwanted access through the use of an enterprise-level strength firewall, perfect as a first line of defense against malware and viruses. This is a hardware firewall, which unlike a software firewall, goes beyond a basic level of protection without slowing workstations and equipment unnecessarily.
The second approach is restricting your employees from visiting unsafe or unsuitable websites for a work environment. Websites can have viruses or malware embedded in the site code itself, potentially providing a window through which they can crawl and wreak untold havoc. Network Depot uses OneStepAhead’s Content Filtering Solutions, which automatically detects inappropriate content and blocks it, without the need for supervisors to enter banned websites by hand.
The following Network Depot blog post gives useful information on how to achieve your security objectives by focusing on two main keys: 1. Employee Education and 2. Network Protection. Two keys to Keeping Your Company Secure
Helpdesk Support
Network Depot uses a remote solution for all of the helpdesk needs your staff may come across. OneStepAhead’s Proactive Managed Desktop Care, the solution used here at Network Depot, consists of software that is installed on each server and workstation. This software allows a Network Depot technician to “dial in” to the affected piece of hardware, and perform fixes and maintenance without having to physically interact with it at all.
Our Desktop and User Care module is also perfect for tracking different and important maintenance information, such as serial numbers, warranties, and information on your different vendors.
While the solutions listed here are definitely invaluable for the lion’s share of medical practices, they are by no means an all-inclusive list of the services offered by Network Depot. If you would like to learn more, please do not hesitate to contact us at your convenience. We have no doubt that you will quickly come to realize just how important the success of your medical practice is to us.