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By Michael Riley, Practice Leader, Logicalis Healthcare Solutions

HIMSS18 is just around the corner, and there’s no doubt that cutting-edge technologies like deep machine learning, digital pathology, precision medicine and genomics will fuel some of the most exciting discussions. Alongside those discussions, however, it’s also critical to talk about the digital foundation a healthcare organization has put in place and whether or not its IT staff is prepared to examine, adopt and support these advanced solutions.

To deliver sophisticated technologies like these requires the full focus and attention of a unique breed of IT specialists. And while these people may already be on your IT staff, if they’re bogged down with the daily operation of your infrastructure, the intellectual bandwidth needed to tackle the implementation and deployment of new clinical or research technologies simply won’t be available.

The solution isn’t adding more staff – it’s simply a matter of having the right roadmap. Before you can succeed with advanced clinical or research technologies, you need a digital foundation that makes strategic use of managed services, IT service management (ITSM), and the cloud to help you take those all-important next steps toward a more efficient, secure, digitally enabled future in which your IT staff and systems are prepared to implement the new technologies being developed and brought to market today.

The Role of Managed Services

Let’s be honest – the 80/20 rule we’ve talked about for decades is still the norm. And in a resources-constrained environment where your healthcare IT team is spending 80 percent or more of its time monitoring events, implementing patches, overseeing backups, staying compliant and managing the service desk, real digital transformation just isn’t an option. Healthcare CIOs simply must find a way to flip that 80/20 rule upside down, and the simplest and most cost-effective way to do that is through the use of managed services. In fact, in a recent survey of 890 CIOs around the world, one quarter said they already outsource most (more than 50 percent) of their IT to a trusted managed services provider.

Automating with IT Service Management

At a time when CXOs and healthcare boards of directors are demanding “more, better, faster” from their IT departments, but budgets are not expanding commensurately, the right automation and ITSM strategies give you another important success-building option: Migrate what you can to the cloud, then automate what you keep in house so neither IT nor clinicians spend unnecessary valuable time on maintenance and management of systems that could effectively run themselves.

Cloud Solutions: A Vital Part of the Plan

IT is no longer all about the infrastructure you own and manage in house; instead, it’s about the quality of services you can efficiently and cost-effectively deliver to users throughout your organization.  To provide a more agile IT experience, many healthcare CIOs have realized, requires a new operational and consumption model that relies on the cloud as a vital and viable part of the plan. And, now that security for cloud solutions has matured, the cloud can and should play a significant role in your organization’s digital transformation strategy.

To help you explore these concepts in more depth, we’ve created a downloadable white paper, “Optimizing Every Healthcare IT Dollar,” that examines the strategic use of cloud, automation and managed services in a healthcare organization’s digital transformation. This paper and three other valuable reports are available for immediate download when you schedule a meeting with Logicalis (Booth #11507) for HIMSS18.

Want to learn more? Download a related datasheet that also examines the role cloud, ITSM and managed services can play in your organization’s digital future. Then explore an extensive collection of Logicalis Healthcare Solutions eBooks, feature articles, white papers, infographics and datasheets on an array of healthcare IT topics, and contact us to discuss your own digital transformation strategy.