Health systems are struggling with major financial headwinds that have shrunk already thin operating margins. IT can and must take a multi-pronged approach to help organizations pursue the Quadruple Aim — reducing costs, improving population health and patient experience, and improving team well-being. First off, IT must look internally at its own budget to make sure any bloat is removed; secondly it must look throughout the organization to ensure deployed applications and other assets aren’t duplicative or redundant; and finally it must analyze current paper-based workflows to determine if an infusion of technology can increase revenue by improving things like scheduling and, thus, throughput. In this timely webinar, we’ll speak to leaders who are focused on doing everything possible to ensure IT has done its part to keep the organization out of the red.

Help desks are being inundated with cyberattacks, most of which are parried, a few of which find their mark, but all of which impact productivity and service. Why? Because agents on high alert must take more time to verify identity before they can even listen to a complaint. So what’s a health system to do? What policies can CIOs and CISOs put in place to help their help desk agents protect the enterprise while not alienating frustrated clinicians who’ve taken the time to reach out for assistance, rather than simply walking away from their keyboards? In this timely webinar, we’ll speak to leaders who’ve put time and thought into the current challenges of running a highly efficient and secure help desk.   

Considering doctors and nurses constitute the lifeblood of a health system — and any workforce report will show they are in short supply — it follows that they must be treated with the proper support and care. So when other reports come out revealing many are struggling with burnout, healthcare executives must ask why, and look to ameliorate any part they may be playing in it. For healthcare IT executives, that part may be best addressed by ensuring that clinicians have a voice in things like vendor selection, and find a ready ear with any concerns about application functionality, alert fatigue, or security-side measures (such as MFA or intermittent auto log outs). In this webinar, we’ll speak to leaders who are doing everything possible to ensure clinicians feel their IT issues are being heard and addressed — leveraging technology with things like  rounding, open-door policies and committees — to hopefully give those key caregivers one less reason to burn out.

To deliver the kinds of experiences patients expect, a healthcare system must act as just that—a unified system. This ideal system breaks down when patients are asked to re-enter their information with each care encounter or staff lose time dealing with cumbersome and repetitive processes that keep them from practicing at the top of their licenses. IT executives have the power to smooth these points of friction by electively and intentionally applying technology to automate manual processes and ensure information flows wherever it is needed.  In this webinar, we’ll speak to leaders who are focused on making sure that— through a combination of technology and process change— their organizations are moving in the right direction.    

Like any risk measure, the level of insider risk in a health system is never static, despite the fleeting comfort a snapshot might provide. Thus, it’s helpful for security and privacy professionals to contemplate the reasons spikes occur so mitigation measures can be implemented at the right time and place. For example, if we consider that issuing new user credentials increases risk (at least until training and education can have an impact), then hiring, firing, and poorly handled identity and access management can cause insider risk levels to spike. Of course that’s not even to mention M&A, which can increase a health system’s risk profile by thousands of employees and hundreds of applications from one day to the next. So what’s an IT executive or privacy officer to do? In this timely webinar, we’ll speak to leaders who are focused on managing insider risk so spikes can be addressed as efficiently as possible, and fines from HHS/OCR avoided.

The recent rash of ransomware-induced outages has truly created a “not if, but when” dynamic for health systems. And with that feeling must come a commitment on the part of all leaders to ensure their organizations can continue safely treating patients and maintaining critical business operations during such an ordeal. To do that, downtime plans need to be revisited, tabletops conducted, and playbooks revised — not just once, but regularly. When it comes to IT leaders, the question has been: how can they best play their parts? How much of preparing the organization falls on their shoulders; how much on emergency management; what are the alternative options for a given function; and how can the two best work together to create the greatest chance of success? In this timely webinar, we’ll speak to leaders who are focused on doing everything in their power to support clinical and business operations until the applications come back.

Application rationalization is one of those thorny projects — absolutely necessary and extremely challenging. It’s absolutely necessary because millions of dollars are potentially being wasted on applications that are little used, if at all, while their mere existence increases the cyber attack surface. And it’s extremely challenging because, even though leveraging data to understand which apps should be retired is relatively straightforward, actually severing those apps from the users who love them adds another layer of complexity. In this timely webinar, we’ll first look at the science of application rationalization to find ripe targets, and then delve into human dynamics that can often stymie these critical initiatives.