Top 2 Benefits of Maximizing Storage Efficiency in Healthcare With a MSP

Healthcare providers are gaining confidence in moving their critical workloads, such as their electronic medical records (EMR) — Epic in most cases — to public clouds, like Azure and AWS instead of keeping them on dedicated on premise infrastructure.

Historically, concerns about security and loss of control contributed to hesitancy amongst healthcare providers to leverage these emerging consumption models. After all, some application providers haven’t always certified their applications to run in the cloud.

While much of this has changed as alternative consumption models such as public cloud has evolved, scaling storage solutions remains critical to maintaining an optimal workload. That’s when a managed services provider (MSP) comes into play. Let’s explore the top two benefits of utilizing a MSP and a few points to consider if your IT team is seeking to hire one.

1. Proactive Capacity Planning and Reporting for Your Storage Environment

Without proper monitoring, healthcare organizations nearing the threshold utilization of a storage platform could face serious consequences. If additional storage is not added, it could disrupt clinicians and practitioners, rendering them unable to access critical patient information. This lack of access to vital data could hinder their ability to make informed decisions and provide quality patient care, highlighting the importance of a MSP for your storage needs.

CDW Managed Services provides proactive capacity planning and reporting using tools like Galileo, Solar Winds, and others to measure your environment's performance tuning and capacity planning thresholds. Suppose you want to be notified when your storage capacity reaches 80% utilization; you’ll not only be made aware of it, but you will also receive suggestions on how much additional storage to add based on your use. This proactive approach ensures you are always prepared and never caught off guard due to insufficient storage.

2. Enhanced Business Storage Solutions and Cost Benefits With Specialized Expertise

CDW Managed Services provides dedicated engineers focused exclusively on the technology domains they’re experts in supporting. Contrary to a jack of all trades, master of none model, the team handling your storage and capacity needs consists of experts focused solely on their respective technologies, be it storage, backup, network, etc.

Due to IT cost constraints and skills shortages, an internal IT team may have one individual performing multiple roles, diluting their focus on critical updates and changes associated with your organization’s platform. Further exacerbating things is a proliferation of tools, whereas CDW Managed Services brings the tools necessary to monitor and manage your environment—expertly installed, tuned, and managed by it’s managed services engineering and reporting teams.

While often times organizations may compare one or two additional headcount to hiring an MSP, this can be misleading. CDW Managed Services brings a team of expertise, providing services on a 24x7 basis. This team not only includes platform-specific engineers, but a governance team, a service desk, tools, and procedural development and documentation to ensure standardization and efficiency in operation. Our goal is to increase your operational maturity through a combination of people, processes, and tools to improve the efficiency and optimization of your environment.

It's one thing to receive an alert from the reporting tools; it’s another to efficiently and effectively triage and resolve that incident and conduct root cause analysis to ensure it doesn’t happen again. That’s where a proven MSP such as CDW provides value versus simply hiring another full-time employee.

If your team is trying to justify whether hiring a MSP to manage your workload is appropriate or if you’re already sifting through a list of providers, here are a few things to consider:

• Critical workloads warrant additional support. Applications like Epic that house information essential for healthcare organizations to provide quality patient care are obviously considered critical workloads. Every industry, like healthcare, has critical workload(s) it relies on to accomplish its mission. For the financial services sector, it may be banking applications, and for retailers, it may be their transaction systems. Regardless the industry, critical workloads warrant 24x7 monitoring and management to ensure availability and resiliency.

• A MSP should specialize in the underlying infrastructure upon which your application (workload) run. When selecting a MSP, it’s imperative that whichever one you choose is familiar with your industry, the vernacular used in the healthcare environment and the impact applications have on the clinician. Your MSP must understand how to use it and ensure your environment is configured and optimized to run as effectively as possible. This will help you measure and achieve Epic’s Honor Roll and reap its benefits.

While in many cases managed services is relatively industry-agnostic, CDW Managed Services has experience in healthcare environments, understands the nuances of, and in many cases, speaks the language of a healthcare IT environment. Beyond managed services, CDW has a specialized, dedicated team of healthcare strategists who are former practitioners, such as CIOs, CTOs, data scientists and architects, who have worked within healthcare systems. They are business professionals who complement our technology experts.

Our healthcare strategists work with healthcare providers to bring forward relevant solutions, which is how CDW has maintained its relevance in the healthcare space as the needs of healthcare organizations have continued to evolve.

• Standardization and measurability are essential. Press for details about a MSP’s adoption of ITIL-based processes and procedures. When administering changes to a system or handling a critical incident, it’s important to consider the downstream impact on other ancillary applications and the potential for negative ramifications elsewhere in the environment. There is a structured approach to implementing changes to avoid negative consequences. That’s why CDW utilizes ITIL-based processes combined with an organization’s existing change management and change approval processes to effectively operate within a dynamic healthcare environment with minimal risk and disruption to ongoing operations.

CDW Managed Services has the expertise to assist your healthcare organization throughout your entire lifecycle, from managing an existing on-premises environment to developing a strategy for cloud adoption, executing that strategy, and ultimately managing the future state environment for the client.

For more information on how CDW Managed Services can support your IT department, visit our website or call 800-800-4239.