5 things every Healthcare CIOs need to know

The traditional role of the healthcare CIO is transforming rapidly. CIOs are leaders that drive the healthcare sector forward. In recent times, healthcare has become a realm of innovation and transformation. It’s a booming sector and being the CIO of this industry does come with its baggage. But, as the industry is growing, so must healthcare CIOs.

Today, CIOs are happily embracing their evolution. As per State of the CIO Statistics, 31% of respondents classified their role as strategic this year. Apart from that, 63% of transformational CIOs and 71% of strategic CIOs categorized the work as more rewarding, compared to only 46% of CIOs still saddled with mostly functional duties. It is also claimed that security and IT strategy is tightly integrated today compared to only 37% in 2016.

But there’s still a few things we wish our healthcare CIOs must know. Here’s a detailed compilation of the top 5 things all healthcare CIOs need to know:

1. Prioritize Security/Cybersecurity

Medical records are worth ten times more than credit card numbers for hackers, since they contain valuable data that can be misused. The 2017 IBM and Ponemon Institute study reveals that the average total cost of data breach for healthcare organization is a whooping $7.35 million. With time, these threats will only become more complex and destructive.

As statistics claim, an alarming rise in ransomware attacks targeted at healthcare institutions is seen and since lives actually depend on the healthcare industry, safeguarding it and understanding that security for the healthcare industry is imperative is extremely crucial. CIOs must understand the gravity behind why prioritizing security for their hospitals matters.

2. Healthcare Tilting Towards Cloud Over Data Centers

Cloud has proven itself to be a reliable and secure choice for some of the largest businesses today. As per statistics, 64% of enterprise companies vouch that cloud infrastructure is a more secure data solution than legacy systems.

A lot of health care sectors are moving their software’s on to Cloud. This decision ranks among being one of the smartest and best professional decisions for the healthcare industry. By moving data on the cloud, you’re also moving the responsibility for maintenance, technology upgrades, staffing, human resources and more onto the cloud provider. This makes your job simpler and safer.

Here’s an example of AWS — Amazon Web Services, one of the top cloud service providers and as per statistics, the durability of an object stored in Amazon S3 is 99.999999999%. If you store 10,000 objects in AWS, on average AWS may lose one of them every 10 million years or so. This storage is designed in such a way that AWS can sustain the concurrent loss of data in two separate storage facilities. Now, these numbers say a lot.

3. Must Stay Abreast With Latest Technology

A CIOs role is no joke for companies. In fact, today it’s become central to business critical operations that also aid in generating revenue. CIOs are leaders, and as leaders they must have a knowledge of the latest IT technologies to direct and move masses.

Having a knowledge of what the latest trends are, can help the industry and also leverage your position in front of the board. Being aware of healthcare technologies can open new doors and possibilities that can keep people healthy, streamline clinical communication and improve the quality and efficiency of care.

With technologies like the Cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), telemedicine, remote monitoring and virtual reality (VR), a lot of horizons can be seen.

4. Cloud Leverages Advanced Secure Technologies

There are many benefits of having cloud based SaaS technology run your systems. A lot of advantages come as your leverage your data to cloud because security must never be an afterthought for any CIO.

Cloud-based security services offer many advantages over traditional security deployments. Here’s a list of the advantages:

• No stand-alone software to constantly update and patch. Cloud is vaste and it updates and upgrades itself as per the latest IT technologies.
• Encryption and Transmission Security. This safeguard refers to the prevention of unauthorized access to EPHI that is being transmitted over an electronic network. All data in transit must be encrypted through a strong protocol, a strong key exchange, and a strong cipher eliminating any potential misuse or unauthorized access.
• Round the clock monitoring to monitor all events. This way if any service/component is down/unavailable, new instance(s) of that service/component are spawn automatically through AutoScaling.
• Rapid deployment and self-service through a web-based portal.
• Ability to scale and expand security coverage quickly, without investing in additional infrastructure.
• Flexible, service-oriented pricing and service level agreements.
• Not expensive. Since you don’t have to purchase, install and maintain any on-premise security hardware our expenses go down.

5. Clinician Workflow

With hospitals expanding and mergers taking place. CIOs must give their staff a helping hand. They must design a solution that incorporates unified communications tools that help make workflow communication and clinical work easy, intuitive and scalable. Having a unified clinical workflow is extremely important.

Having a great CDI and CAC software that’s hosted on the cloud and is HIPAA compliant is the catch. The quality of care in any hospital is especially dependent on efficient clinical workflow that reduces DNFB, has no down time and makes communication and work easy.

Wrapping this up, CIOs must concentrate on the bigger picture, but at the same time must never forget the little intrinsic details on the canvas that can help grow and strengthen any hospital internally.

ezDI is a platform that’s hosted on HIPAA compliant AWS Cloud. Our cloud infrastructure leverages all advanced technologies for — data encryption, proactive monitoring, data security, network protection and identity & access management. It includes a range of services such as advanced authentication, penetration and vulnerability testing, real time threat monitoring, network behaviour analysis as well as security alert analysis. This leads to top notch security, virtual zero downtime, faster data recovery mechanisms, easy scalability of applications as well as 100% availability of data.