Every aspect of your practice affects patient care and the patient experience. The decisions you make about managing your dental IT solutions are patient-care decisions as much as they are business decisions.
However, dental IT requirements can overwhelm practices, especially in small and mid-sized organizations. They often lack the resources to manage their IT systems fully.
That's where a dental IT managed services provider (MSP) can help. Using a dental MSP simply means outsourcing your dental practice IT operations to an expert rather than trying to handle it all in-house. Services can include data backup and recovery, data security and compliance management, cloud migration, HIPAA compliance, risk assessment, integrating new applications, and much more.
Outsourcing to an MSP can enhance the business side of your practice and improve patient care and your patients' experience. We've identified four ways partnering with an MSP will make your life easier and enhance patient care.
1. Protect patient data, protect patients
HIPAA compliance is essential; the penalties for non-compliance are severe. But perhaps the most damaging repercussions? Lost confidence and trust. Patients trust you with their most personal data. Violate that trust and you damage — even destroy — the relationship with them. Data breaches can even have a negative effect on patient treatment, according to a HIPAA Journal Research article.
An MSP can help keep your data secure — and your patients' trust safe — far more than an overwhelmed in-house IT team.
2. Support care coordination and data access
There's no shortage of patient data these days. There are claims, imaging, lab data, and, increasingly, patient-provided biometric data. The move toward cloud-based solutions makes it possible to aggregate real-time information from across the care continuum, which means patient care can also be coordinated across the care continuum.
But capturing and integrating that data can be a challenge. You may want to turn to a dental IT professional services provider. Look for an MSP that supports secure data sharing across dental platforms.
This has a direct impact on patient safety. When data is siloed, a practice does not get a complete picture of a patient. This can lead to medication errors, redundant tests, and missed care solutions. On the other hand, when a practice is inundated with unfiltered data, it's overwhelmed. The data is neither valuable nor actionable.
To provide optimal care to your patients, you need immediate access to all the data streams presented in an intelligent, actionable way.
3. Reduce burnout, enhance care
Dentists and other clinicians are increasingly burned out. The Newsweek Burnout Report 2022 estimates that 54% of clinicians were reporting exhaustion, decreased motivation, and more cynical attitudes towards patients. One of the leading reasons? Technology overload. Managing hardware and software is difficult enough; dealing with data overload is pushing some doctors to the edge.
When that happens, patients inevitably suffer. Burnout drives dentists and dental hygienists to retire early or reduce their hours. This can result in poor patient care and significant medical errors.
By outsourcing your IT management, you have less stress and more time to devote to patient care. In addition, the right technology infrastructure — which an MSP can advise you on and help put in place — makes your life easier and enhances the patient's experience.
4. Prevent gaps in care
Servers can fail and computers malfunction. Natural and manmade disasters, including cyberattacks, can take down your practice for days — perhaps longer.
There are two issues at play here, both of which affect your ability to provide patient care. Data backup ensures your data is safe. But backup is just one aspect of recovery from a disaster. What about your practice itself? How quickly can you get it operating again? A good MSP provides backup and helps ensure business continuity.
For patients, this means no gaps in healthcare services. You and your MSP will know that you averted a catastrophe, but for the patient, it's business as usual.
Better healthcare IT solutions, better patient care
The marketplace is full of IT solutions providers. Finding the right one — one that focuses on dental care and has services to the specific needs of your practice — will enhance patient care. To help identify your particular needs, reach out to Pact-One Solutions, one of the leading dental IT solutions providers that speak the language of dental care and knows its world inside and out. We'll identify how you can improve your health IT systems, reduce the burden on your practice, and allow you to focus more on what matters: taking care of patients.
