For nearly 20 years, Netgain has been providing cloud services within the healthcare industry. We’ve served single-provider clinics, multi-specialty practices and healthcare cooperatives that encompass several practices and their users. Throughout our experience, we’ve developed a team of technologists who specialize in all areas of clinical IT.
Our reputation as thought leaders in healthcare IT means we regularly collect feedback and input from our clients and industry partners. We partner with organizations like Helpdesk Institute, HIMSS Analytics and Microsoft to gain valuable industry insights.
Recently, we conducted our own survey of healthcare professionals to review current trends in healthcare IT. This survey worked in concert with another survey we conducted in collaboration with HIMSS Analytics on cloud readiness and IT-as-a-Service.
Survey Methodology
Netgain sent the Healthcare Industry Survey via email link to our database of Practice Administrators, CEOs and IT Directors. There were 241 total survey respondents.
Survey Purpose
These industry insights help us determine where to focus our innovation efforts, how to better serve our clients and what’s on the minds of our prospects, so we can ensure our services are meeting the needs of the industry.
Below is a snapshot of the results and significant findings. For detailed results, percentages and specific questions, send an email to marketing@netgaincloud.com; I’d be happy to send you a copy of the report.
We’ve learned that practices face unique pains and have different drives to adopt cloud technologies. In our survey, respondents were asked which IT challenges their organization faces and how severely they impact the organization’s ability to achieve its goals. Here’s what we found out:
- Users don’t know where IT performance issues stem from, and don’t know whether they should call IT support or not.
- Managing multiple information sources, perhaps in different data silos, and pulling them together to produce useful business intelligence.
- Users have to repeatedly enter credentials, and often have to recall several disparate username/password combinations. Different password policies mean that users sometimes can’t keep passwords aligned or identical.
- The threat of ransomware and cryptomalware, where a user’s lapse in judgement can result in the lock-up of critical data and systems, with the demand for wildly-ranging ransoms needing to be paid is crippling for many organizations.
As organizations evaluate how they will manage the growing complexity of their IT environment, they’re evaluating cloud services providers to become an extension of their IT department. We asked respondents to rate which factors were most important to them when evaluating cloud providers. Here are the top factors:
- Technical, administrative and physical security of cloud services provider (rated 1, 2 and 3, respectively)
- Experience with practices in the same/similar specialty
- Strength of Service Level Agreement
- Security Certifications (HITRUST, SSAE18, SOC1, PCI, etc.)
Further, respondents were asked which challenges they’ve had with their cloud providers.
- Costs and fees (37%)
- Performance and speed (31%)
- Communication (22%)
- Customer Service (21%)
- Technical knowledge or capabilities (21%)
Looking ahead at the upcoming year, we asked respondents to identify which IT solutions they are planning to purchase within next 12 months. Here’s how they rated:
- Business intelligence and data analytics
- SSO and MFA
- Unlimited data storage
- Performance monitoring dashboards
- Mobile device management
Similarly, we asked respondents which solutions are most valuable to their organizations. In line with the security theme we’ve been seeing, intrusion prevention solutions rated the highest.
- Intrusion prevention
- Performance monitoring dashboards
- Email digital loss prevention
- Unlimited data storage
- Ransomware-proof local computing
Our survey dug deeper on cloud adoption factors, concerns and adoption of other IT solutions. For the full copy of the report, send an email to marketing@netgaincloud.com.
After carefully reviewing the data, we are considering the findings and are excited to integrate components into our service and product roadmap for 2018 and beyond.