Epic Managed Services requires more than just technical application support. Remember when the healthcare industry first installed technology but failed to include wrap-around support for operational and clinical success? For many, it spelled trouble. The lack of planned organization-wide transformation and long-term maintenance strategies were painful lessons that ought not to be repeated. Many decades later, most organizational leaders now know a significant indicator of an organization’s success with its technology. It’s certainly not the hardware purchased. It’s actually much harder to measure. The key to successfully implementing your Epic Managed Services model is communication, especially across departments, and now more than ever, virtually.
When application, clinical, and operational teams communicate effortlessly, it creates organic feedback loops that lead to incremental and continuous improvement. This is a critical component of ensuring that your large investment in technology creates the intended organizational-wide results, both for today and tomorrow. Developing those communication channels and the culture around them must be integrated into your technology build, install, and long-term support. The same logic applies to your Managed Services partnership. A Managed Services Application support team focuses on a specific scope of work, generally, build and configuration of the technology at hand. In practice, though, this team supports much more than just the technology.
Managed Services consultants integrate into your internal team and in most cases improve output, service, quality, user satisfaction, and even scalability. However, sustaining those benefits requires complementary services delivered in tandem with build and configuration. To gain the most from your Managed Services investment, organizations should include add-on services such as training. Training takes a managed service offering above and beyond just build and configuration. It’s that key component to long-term success mentioned above.
Experienced trainers bring a wealth of knowledge gained from other healthcare organizations and then uniquely tailor their training to fit your team’s culture and ways of working. Trainers prepare your people on your workflows, while also providing best practice improvements that can enhance your team’s workflows, both within and outside the technology. The training plus application support model inherently promotes communication within your application team and the broader organization.
So, Managed Services support should be treated with the same perspective as investing in technology. The service alone is not enough. When used in conjunction with broader support services, you gain far superior results. This is exactly how Optimum approaches Managed Services, with a holistic strategy on the healthcare industry’s unique needs combined with focused support when and where you need it.
If you want to learn more about our services, approach, and partnership mentality, reach out to your sales representative or contact us. We look forward to supporting you on your healthcare IT journey.
