We’re not just an IT services company that decided to get into healthcare. We’re a healthcare company that specializes in IT.
We’re not just an IT services company that decided to get into healthcare. We’re a healthcare company that specializes in IT.
While the challenges can seem insurmountable at times, one thing is true: we’re all in this together, attempting to overcome similar obstacles. For this paper, CareTech Solutions interviewed the IT leaders at four distinctively different medical facilities who were among the first to complete Stage One.
The goal was to build, implement and run an entirely new IT system in no more than eight months! The new IT infrastructure, with 157 systems, applications and modules, would be one of the most aggressive and rapid implementations of complete IT systems in American healthcare history.
Through a robust system-selection process that engaged the entire organization, the decision was made to move forward with Meditech as their new EMR vendor, in collaboration with CareTech.
In conjunction with CareTech Solutions, SLVRMC set about laying the groundwork for a comprehensive IT reorganization. First and foremost, the hospital realized that a new way of thinking about IT was necessary.
As hospitals across the nation invest in and implement electronic medical records (EMRs) to satisfy Meaningful Use requirements, they must also think about their ability to successfully support clinical end-users to help ensure adoption in both the short and long run.
What does it take for a healthcare organization to successfully transition into today’s complex, fully electronic environment? Strong asset management is the key.
Because you don’t have a “Rosetta Stone” for your data, our integration and interoperability services exist.
A partnership with our Application Development and Managed Services gives your hospital or health system access to a wealth of industry-leading technical expertise without the need for lengthy training, recruiting or rehiring periods.
Secure and compliant data center hosting and managed services to protect the integrity of your data.
To build a new data center meant securing a new location and construction, which necessitated significant capital. To upgrade meant move or revamp the existing data center, potentially building another floor or expanding space in the current facility. To partner meant finding a remote supplier who could help address considerations such as: capital versus operating expense, system availability, stability and scalability, and technical resources.
The hospital had to migrate its clinical and business operations, as well as physically transfer servers from their former data center to CareTech Solutions in Troy, Michigan. The challenge was to accomplish all this – in three days!
The fast-paced shift of information technology services to the cloud introduces new challenges to healthcare organizations. As IT leaders seek cost-effective solutions, it is important to understand cloud-based offerings in order to determine which technology as a service (TaaS) is right for their organization.
As hospitals IT leaders adapt to changing reimbursement and value-based care models, many are choosing to outsource some or all of their IT environments. Partnering with a full service solutions provider allows them to optimize data center performance and improve efficiency, flexibility, care quality and reduce costs.
See how CareTech Solutions’ Service Desk is much more than a traditional hospital help desk.
CareTech is preparing to transition to a new service management platform, ServiceNow, while maintaining the current Remedy platform.
Traditional call-center models, while able to manage higher call volumes, typically employ IT generalists who lack the healthcare specific expertise needed to support the electronic clinical systems. Internal arrangements using hospital staff can work, but also draw nurses and physicians away from their primary responsibility, patient care. What’s needed is an application that does all this and more: an enhanced help desk that is really more of a “service desk.”
Today, best-in-class asset management is a fully-integrated, highly-proactive, cradle-to-grave, strategy-based approach. In this white paper, we will provide an overview of the CareTech Solutions asset management process, along with some tips for assuring success in this increasingly important area.
Clinical IT service desk staff members are playing an increasingly crucial role in assisting providers.
Simple password reset requests are the most common calls to any hospital help desk, often averaging 20-30% of all calls. They can tie up analysts who could be resolving more complicated issues.
When a physician calls CareTech Solutions’ Service Desk, it’s always urgent. It may be a life-or-death matter, or the busy physician is simply pressed for time.
Proactive walkthroughs by IT field engineers enabled one hospital system to satisfy users, reduce help desk calls and generate savings.
Are you unable to keep up with the volume of Service Desk calls because of routine patient portal inquiries? Is your hospital staff busy answering simple questions that distract from more critical calls?
Facing unauthorized changes? Unplanned downtimes? 24x7x365 availability of IT services is essential in today’s healthcare IT environment.
One critical element to a major enterprise-wide system launch is putting in place a robust Command Center to tackle the abundance of largely unpredictable issues that always arise during the first week of a system implementation. Four healthcare IT veterans discuss what it takes.
Continuum Health Partners and Oakwood Healthcare share their customer insights regarding CareTech Solutions’ Service Desk on their respective journeys to elevate their health systems’ IT help desks to respond to the increasing online needs of clinical end users.
With the different levels of service for different stages of electronic medicine, the CareTech Solutions Service Desk Maturity Model provides a way to gauge where a healthcare organization stands in terms of providing IT help desk support for its end users.
Hospital leadership came to believe that if you can understand the problems that users are experiencing, then those problems can be addressed – and resolved. An integral part of that is finding out whether users are getting the help they need and expect from the help desk.
Hospitals are outsourcing help desks to improve clinician satisfaction.
As the IT environments of healthcare organizations have grown more complex, the quality of help desk support may be subject to closer scrutiny.
With the high profile role technology plays in the practice of modern medicine, one could argue that healthcare IT leaders are faced with more pressing challenges than ever before.
CareTech Solutions’ Epic Level 2 (EL2) Service Desk handles questions from Epic users that only highly trained analysts – the best of the best – can answer.
What can you do to meet the ever-increasing needs and expectations of your hospital’s IT users that goes well beyond the usual incident management and break fixes?
A remote, integrated monitoring service designed and built exclusively to support hospital information technology systems 24x7x365. Reduce unscheduled downtime and stay ahead of issues that impact the patient experience.
Shifting the focus to the end-user experience provides major benefits to Oakwood Healthcare. Oakwood has fine-tuned its IT monitoring approach, breaking past the barriers that many experience to find “game-changing” results.
Clearances and access rights of employees remain points of vulnerability for the security of any healthcare organization
As the modern healthcare organization becomes more and more dependent on its complex electronic systems, it cannot afford a failure in any area.
Trying to stay ahead of performance issues that impact service delivery while running an IT environment that users can have confidence in? CareTech Solutions’ Pulse IT Monitoring Service can help you give users a reliable and predictable IT experience all day – every day.
The Secured Healthcare Recovery Cloud offers the peace of mind of knowing that all of your data is safely secured along with full redundancy to lower your recovery times.
Backed by CareTech Solutions, Oakwood Healthcare has transformed its disaster recovery plan, and the change is a dramatic one – a reduction of recovery time from one day to less than half an hour. Here’s how.
CareTech’s information security professionals employ a comprehensive, risk-based approach towards each assessment, examining your hospital’s policies against industry best practices and all HIPAA and EHR Incentive Program compliance issues.
Today, best-in-class asset management is a fully-integrated, highly-proactive, cradle-to-grave, strategy-based approach. In this white paper, we will provide an overview of the CareTech Solutions asset management process, along with some tips for assuring success in this increasingly important area.
Actionable, threat-based recommendations to reduce the likelihood of your healthcare organization becoming a victim of cybercrime.
In today’s challenging cybersecurity environment, 90% of healthcare organizations had at least one data breach in the last two years. Estimated average economic impact to each is $2 million over a two-year period.
Through this new process of opening the system selection process to as many stakeholders as possible, NMC was able to achieve broad involvement and support, as well as near unanimity among physicians and employees in the selection of an EHR vendor.
Many healthcare organizations have worked hard to reduce cybersecurity risks in recent years. However, there is still much to be done before patients can have the level of confidence in the cybersecurity of healthcare organizations that they deserve.
The purpose of this paper is to help healthcare providers understand the HIPAA requirement for encryption of data at rest and apply it appropriately to their IT environments.
An enterprise’s website is the public face of the organization, presenting its products or services and increasingly providing a convenient way for users to transact business. Yet it also provides a “window of vulnerability” for sophisticated intruders into the inner workings – and the very infrastructure – of an organization. Healthcare organizations are particularly vulnerable.
Presented at Northern Ohio Healthcare Trade Faire & Regional Conference, Jim Deren, CareTech’s Director of Information Technology, Healthcare Planning.
CareTech Solutions is preparing to transition to a new service management platform.
Who pays for the security of your freeware, or rather, the lack thereof?
The latest edition of the monthly blog from the HIMSS Privacy and Security Commission.
The Medicare & Medicaid EHR Incentive Program Registration and Attestation System made an announcement to extend their deadline.
“Observations on the Risk Management of Medical Device and Software Cybersecurity” with Jeff Bell
CareTech has invested significantly in its cybersecurity capabilities in recent years and is ready to work with you to address cybersecurity risks.
Eligible professionals and eligible hospitals may be exempt from payment adjustments if they can show that a significant hardship has restricted their ability to demonstrating Meaningful Use in the required timeframe.
Regardless of where you are in your Meaningful Use journey, if your goal is to receive reimbursement, it is critical that you continually review and adjust your plan based upon the financial and scheduling implications of the law.
As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), Congress mandated payment adjustments to be applied to Medicare-eligible professionals and hospitals who are not Meaningful Users of Certified Electronic Health Record (EHR) Technology under the Medicare EHR Incentive Programs.
Recent changes to the timing for hospitals and providers to comply with Meaningful Use requirements reinforce the notion that healthcare organizations must regularly review and understand how updates to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 HITECH rule affect them.
In an effort to keep current with the changes on the topic of Meaningful Use, CareTech Solutions developed this five-part series on things to know, changes and key timing of requirements to help you navigate through your Meaningful Use journey.
Given the enforcement activities, investigations and audits from the Office of Civil Rights and other state and federal government agencies, it should be an urgent priority for every healthcare provider and business associate to fully comply with the HIPAA Security Rule.
As hospitals and eligible providers attest to Meaningful Use, it is important that they retain all evidence supporting their attestation in preparation for a potential Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) audit.
The Federal Register has been updated to describe new specifications that are required in order for hospitals and providers to comply with Stage 1 – regardless of their first year of attestation and EHR adoption.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) intends for Stage 2 to advance clinical processes for continuous quality improvement, and to pave the way for Stage 3 to advance quality outcomes.
Even if your organization does not employ eligible providers in ambulatory settings, Radiologists who provide more than 10% of their services (which includes invasive procedures and diagnostic services) are subject to the Stage 1 Meaningful Use requirements for eligible providers.
On Feb. 23, 2012, the CMS released the Notice for Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) for the Stage 2 requirements for Meaningful Use of Electronic Medical Records. This date begins a 60-day feedback period where comments and recommendations will be received in order to finalize the Stage 2 requirements.
Stage 1 focuses on the capture and sharing of clinical information among the care team. Stages 2 and 3 focus on advanced care processes, decision support and improved outcomes. Completion and continued compliance with all Stage 1 requirements are prerequisites to meeting the Stage 2 and 3 goals.
Even if you are not ready to attest to meeting all of the requirements for stage one of Meaningful Use, you may be eligible for a portion of the Medicaid payment immediately.
The requirement for a security risk analysis may sound vague and unclear, but those who specialize in information security regard risk assessment as an essential step to improving an organization’s security program.
Need to learn more about what’s happening with health information technology in your state? Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) has launched a new State Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) Dashboard.
Attestation for the Medicare Electronic Medical Record incentive program begins April 18th. This means that those who are ready to receive Medicare incentives for Meaningful Use Stage One can complete their applications.
There is a new concept of “skipping years” that has been introduced in the final Meaningful Use Ruling. This concept is one that needs to be considered as we look to our long-term IT strategic plans related to Meaningful Use for the next few years.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius hosted a live video conference on July 13, 2010, to announce the final rules targeted to improve the delivery of health care, increase safety and quality, and reduce costs.
