With the government stimulus dollars on their way to hitting doctors wallets, more and more practices are converting to a hosted EMR (electronic medical record) or EHR (electronic health record). 

Companies like Greenway Medical, NextGen Healthcare, GE, and Sage Software all provide the software for this technology. Traditionally, practices have purchased and managed their own servers, hosting the software onsite at their facilities.

Until the mass emergence of EMR/EHR, small business IT services have been enough to support a small medical practice. Now though, a hosted EMR/EHR requires a special understanding of the “point of care” or “patient encounter,” to use the industry terms.

The difficulty with each doctor’s office hosting its own EMR/EHR comes down to expertise and reliability. Most practices have very limited resources at their disposal when they need them in the middle of an outage. Thus, many doctors are moving away from the traditional model of small business IT services to a managed IT support platform. Managed IT support comes with real-time support and an always-on service level agreement that guarantees uptime.

As the IT industry has begun to see a rapid commoditization of information technology for business, we believe that the healthcare industry will lead the way in this transition. Because of the high stakes associated with keeping a network running, medical practices are turning to strategic hosting partners to ensure their continuity.

For more on EMR/EHR hosting in Knoxville, Chattanooga, or elsewhere, click here to continue on to see our hosting solutions product offerings.

One of the biggest considerations in strategic IT planning is projected data growth. Data volumes are growing astronomically, and the current amount of data out there today is supposed to grow 44 times in the next eight years. After all traditional media has finished their switch from analog to digital, the world’s total volume of data will grow to an estimated 35 trillion gigabytes by 2020. So realistically we’ve seen only the first drops in the bucket concerning our industry’s data production.

How do we healthily manage all this data? The day to day management is hard: backups, archiving, and compliance are all becoming more difficult to manage, but one of the biggest barriers to maintaining good data management is price.

Data storage and management are expensive.

The difficulties with traditional data storage are numerous. For starters, it’s difficult for businesses to effectively plan their provisioning of storage. Buy too little and you face constant upgrades, but buy too much and your hardware just sits around getting dusty, taking up rackspace, and using power. Also, given the 3-5 year rate of obsolescence, you’re looking at a new six-figure SAN every 48 months.

If you don’t like outages, building redundancy is even more expensive and beyond all of these technical considerations is the essential element of human capital. With more hardware and more administration comes the necessity of more people to run those elements.

For years we’ve lived with these problems in our IT departments because it’s just been the game we’ve had to play. Fortunately we’re not held prisoner to the fact that our data is growing faster than we can plan for it.

First, we’ll address the issue of storage provisioning. As we said, it’s nearly impossible to 100% effectively plan for the amount of storage you need. And when you do add storage, problems arise with adding it dynamically and timely enough.

We’ve had several partners experience the benefit of outsourcing their data storage to a cloud provider. Generally speaking, end users aren’t concerned with the amount of data they produce. When upper management pays monthly for each gigabyte that each user produces, the company’s ability to then keep their data volumes in check is surprisingly keen. Naturally, when more storage is needed, more storage is bought. But since users are held accountable for their data usage, the effects are noticeable.

In the opposite scenario where storage is owned and maintained within a company, the data that becomes unwieldy is nearly impossible to reclassify as no longer needed and thus difficult to delete. So a cycle begins of growing data volumes that necessitate more storage needs and more human capital and capital expenditures. You then have a clean slate to repeat the process of storage provisioning and exhaustion.

Once the issues of storage amounts are addressed, the issue of speed must be resolved. 

If you own your own storage, you have to buy for the highest foreseeable speeds you’ll need, no matter how often, or infrequently, you might use it. Storing data with a cloud provider offers the benefits of tiered storage: your data is dynamically moved to faster or slower storage as needed. For instance, one of our clients is an accounting firm. In the hectic months of March and April for them, we move their frequently accessed data from mid-grade storage to the premium, faster storage to increase their efficiency and speed. This is a huge advantage in cloud storage. For data you don’t access very often, it can be held in low-end storage. In the instance that you’ll need a lot of that data very quickly, though, it can be dynamically reallocated to better resources.

As an added plus, a worthwhile cloud provider will help you fulfill your disaster recovery plan since they’ll replicate your data for you. The benefits here are that: one, your backups are managed for you, and two, in this scenario your disaster recovery plan will be much easier to test given that your data is offsite.

 In closing, as data volumes continue to grow, the costs, resources, and headaches associated with managing them will continue to grow with them. This is a huge reason for the growing trend of businesses hosting data in the cloud. Partnering with a cloud storage provider is a good opportunity to free up your IT staff so they can be productive in other areas since the burdens of backups, SAN maintenance, rackspace, cooling, and dynamic expansion are all alleviated. Then, you stop working for your IT – you make it work for your business.

I like the sound of my alarm clock in about the same way that I enjoy squash casserole. I don’t.

 

Some days especially, it’s like I have to get out of bed and start immediately in fifth gear instead of first. Generally on those days I’ll idle at 7 minute intervals between two or three snooze cycles.

 

It turns out the reason you feel like that some mornings is because you wake up in the middle of a deep sleep phase. The best time for your alarm to go off is during a light sleep phase; the transition into waking is much less drastic.

 

So for anyone who has mornings like the ones described above (and has an iPhone), you should check out Lexware Labs’ Sleep Cycle app for the iPhone.

 

The Sleep Cycle app uses the iPhone’s internal accelerometer to track your body’s movements through the night, judging your sleep phase.  If you move a lot, you’re in light sleep, or if you don’t move much, you’re deeply asleep.  You pick a time that you need to wake up by, and the application will use specially engineered wake up sounds to wake you up during your lightest sleep cycle within a half hour before you need to get up.

 

One other great feature of the app is that it provides graphs of your sleep cycles through the night, so you can really gauge the quality of sleep you get each night.  I’ve used the app for 53 nights now, and it’s helped me figure out what routine enables a good night’s sleep. It tracks how much sleep you get each night and your average amount of time slept.

 

The technology here is a great addition to the mobile application market.  Standalone products that perform this same function have been around for years.  These products cost a few hundred dollars, so as you can imagine this application makes the sleep cycle alarm technology available to a much more broad audience.

 

I’ve found that it’s not uncommon for the app to go off at the latest time I need to get up regardless of my sleep phase before, but most of these instances can be attributed to user error.

 

The app is available in Apple’s app store for $.99.  Android users can download Smart Alarm for their phones to perform the same function. I haven’t used that app, but the technology and concept are the same for each.
 

I’ve had the iPad for a few weeks now and had plenty of opportunity to get comfortable with it.

 

I was unsure about how my feelings toward the device would evolve, but my favorable first impression has turned into a lasting enjoyment of my new tablet.

Upon pulling it out of the box, my initial fears of the iPad not being a true stand-alone device were confirmed: I had to plug it into my computer just like I did the iPhone.  Once everything was installed and running, I found the interface was outstanding.  Everything with the iPad is very intuitive and clean.

 

The most practical application I use on the iPad is LogMeIn Ignition.  It’s $29.99 in the App Store, but worth every penny.  LogMeIn on the iPad lets me almost replace my laptop when I’m out of the office.  I can log in to my windows machine and run our line of business application and the Microsoft Office Suite.  The wireless Bluetooth keyboard I bought with the iPad is an excellent addition, even though the virtual keyboard is surprisingly easy to type on.

 

I use two monitors back at the office, and to switch from one desktop to the other all you do is shake the iPad (like an Etch A Sketch) and the view switches.  It’s much lighter and more pleasant to transport than a laptop, and overall the experience with this functionality adds a lot of value to the device, but it’s certainly not lacking in drawbacks.

 

First, the lack of multitasking on the iPad’s OS is painfully evident.  Every time I had to leave my line of business application to check my calendar or email, I’d have to reinitiate the LogMeIn Ignition log in sequence – time consuming and aggravating. 

 

Also, you can’t just tap where you want the cursor to be when you’re accessing an application through remote connection.  Even though the app was developed for a touchscreen, the touch functionality doesn’t extend to applications utilized through LogMeIn.  It would be much better if the Windows-side interface was touch enabled.

 

Overall, the user experience with the iPad is outstanding.  The native mail client and calendar application get an A+ for their outstanding communication and collaboration.  It won’t replace my business machine, but the iPad will be a great device to use out of the office.