Successful healthcare IT: Insights from the front lines

We will start in exactly a minute. While we wait for a couple more people to join us, if you’ve been on an Atera webinar in the past, you know what our ritual is. We love to know where you’re joining us from, so let’s test out the public chat. Let us know where you’re from. Okay, Sean, hello Sean. Thank you for joining from South Carolina. Welcome. We’ve got an audience from California, Canada. Welcome everyone, thank you for joining our webinar. Great to have you all with us today. As I said, we’ll be starting in just a moment. We also have participants from Pakistan and Spain. Great, an international audience we have today. Wonderful. 

Again, hello everyone and welcome. My name is Muna Assi, and I head the product marketing team here at Atera. I’m very excited to be moderating a session today with two gentlemen, customers of Atera, to talk about insights from the front lines in the realm of healthcare IT. Just before we get started, let’s go through some housekeeping. This webinar is being recorded, and we will share the link to the recording with registrants within 24 hours of the session. For questions or comments, I invite you to please post them in the Q&A section. We will be addressing those right at the end. At the end of the webinar, we’ll hold a live Q&A session with our speakers, so please don’t be shy. Put your questions in the Q&A box, and we will take those towards the end. Right at the end, we will have a very short survey—just five questions. Please take the time, if you don’t mind, to answer it. It takes one minute of your time and helps us continue to improve and bring topics of interest. 

Without further ado, please allow me to introduce our speakers. Gentlemen, welcome. Let’s start with you, Mike. Mike Crowder, National Director of IT at Alixa RX. Welcome, Mike. Thank you for joining us today. 

Mike: Thank you. It’s good to be here. For the registrants and people on the webinar, I’ve been in the healthcare IT space for 33 years now. It’s a unique industry, as probably a lot of you on the call realize. 

Muna: For sure, 33 years means that it’s not just unique but a challenge that keeps you excited every day. 

Mike: Very much. 

Muna: Awesome. Thank you for joining us. Adam, welcome. Adam Verock, System Administrator at Wilmington Eye. Thank you for joining us today. 

Adam: Thanks for having me. Hello everybody. I just recently switched to healthcare IT three years ago, so I’ll be able to provide some insight into what it’s like to be in the general IT sector and then switching to healthcare. 

Muna: Good. Adam, I know that you’ve been in IT since 2004. Maybe tell us a little bit about your history. 

Adam: Yes. I started out with an internship at a bank and then moved into a position there for a couple of years. Then I did some IT work for an industrial company. After that, I moved to working at an MSP for quite a while. We serviced thousands of customers, so I pretty much saw every possible nook and cranny of IT that you could probably see. I probably forgot most of it, but it’s been a good transition to healthcare IT and healthcare because it fits me better. It’s a little more “think on your feet, shoot from the hip,” because you have to be quick to change with what changes around you. That’s kind of what I hope to bring. 

Muna: Thank you, and we’ll definitely talk more about what it is that makes IT and healthcare unique and what are some of the daily challenges. Before we go into that, I’d love to learn a little bit more, Mike, on your end. Tell us a little bit about Alixa RX and your position there and what does that really mean. ## Insights from the Front Lines 

Mike: Sure. Basically, my title is National Director of IT for Alixa RX. I manage all of our IT functions across the US in much the same way a CTO or CIO would manage. I’m very much a roll-up-my-sleeves-every-day-and-do-the-work type of person, as well as setting direction for my employees and for an outsourced group I have in the Philippines. Alixa RX is an institutional pharmacy, so you can’t walk into us off the street like a CVS or Walgreens and buy medications. We service specific post-acute care sites with automated medication dispensing machines. We’re in 16 states today and have about 25,000 covered patients. Each customer facility has access to around 400 medications on-site, readily available, including opioids and controlled substances, but they are very tightly monitored. We have five operating pharmacies, and our dispensing sites are within a perimeter around those of 200 to 300 miles. They are in Fresno, Kansas City, Kansas, Indianapolis, Indiana, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We cover three time zones: Pacific, Eastern, and Central Time Zone in the US. We are privately cloud-hosted, so we don’t have our own data center, but all of our sites, remote sites, and pharmacies connect to a data center based in Dallas, Texas. We have about 500 user endpoints that are a combination of PCs, laptops, thin clients, and even customer site PCs that drive the dispensing machines. They are all maintained in Atera and supported by our central IT team here in the Dallas, Texas area. So that’s a plug for Atera, as it gives us the ability to manage these devices from afar. We don’t have IT folks in our pharmacies, just in our corporate headquarters here. We support numerous technologies from software development, quality assurance, integration middleware, mobile devices, to networks and voice over IP telephone systems nationally. A little bit about Alixa RX and my role here: I get involved in everything from software development to management of our end-user devices, management of our network connectivity between all of our sites, employee trouble tickets, as well as customer trouble tickets. I run very much a 24×7 organization. 

Muna: Amazing. That’s a lot of responsibility on your shoulders. And I don’t believe, Mike, you shared with us where you are actually based. 

Mike: Yeah, I’m actually based in Plano, Texas. That’s where our headquarters is. We’re just outside of Dallas, Texas for those of you that are familiar with Texas. So we’re here in North Texas, and I love it here. 

Muna: Wonderful. Thank you for that introduction. Definitely a well-established and large organization. And I love that you shared that you are supporting IT remotely. I think that’s probably one of the key things that we will discuss: what does it mean for a distributed site and support of IT. Back to you, Adam. Can you hear me? I see that you may have some technical challenges, maybe with the video. 

Adam: Yes, can you hear me?

Muna: We can hear you but we cannot see you. 

Adam: Yeah, I’m sorry about that. It’s kind of a cliché for an IT guy to have IT issues, but here we are. 

Muna: All right. Can you see our screen at least? I think we can try to proceed. 

Adam: Yes, I can see the screen. 

Muna: Tell us a little bit about Wilmington Eye. Who are you, what do you do, and what’s your role there specifically on a day-to-day basis? 

Adam: Sure. I’m the system administrator. I did have two people on my team, but recently lost one earlier this year. We realized that we could function as two people, so we’re just kind of going with it right now. The practice was founded in 1975 and has been around the area for a while. We have eight locations servicing about six counties. We have the only outpatient surgery center in the area. Currently, we have 23 providers, but we’ll be adding two more later this year. Of those, 11 are surgeons, 11 are eye doctors, and one is a medical ophthalmologist. Other than that, it’s pretty much like you would expect any eye doctor to be. It’s just a larger firm where we all kind of pool resources and share equipment and whatnot. 

Muna: Great, and you’re based out of North Carolina, correct? 

Adam: Yes, Wilmington, North Carolina. 

Muna: Wonderful. Thank you for that, Adam. Now let’s really start to dig into healthcare IT as a unique vertical. Can we really say, Mike, that healthcare IT is a unique vertical? If yes, what are some of your unique challenges and pain points? 

Mike: Yes, Muna, it is a unique vertical. Some of the unique challenges we have are HIPAA and HITECH regulations. Most of you in IT anywhere have HIPAA regulations for your employees, but we’re also dealing with patients, and securing their information is very important. You hear about firms around the US involved in healthcare where they have breaches of patient data, or companies have breaches of customer data. Those are events that can actually find you so much that you’re put out of business. Other unique pain points we face include network connectivity challenges across 220 sites around the US plus our own sites. Other challenges get more into healthcare-specific regulations like the HITECH Act, Medicare, Medicaid, insurance payers, and the Veterans Administration. Very unique challenges, a lot of regulations, and new regulations that force us to change software and deploy new products frequently. From a high level, those are the main challenges and pain points faced by Alixa RX. 

Muna: And Adam, from your end, you spoke about being currently a one-man show providing IT support for 23 providers. Can you talk about some of the IT challenges that you’re seeing, especially since you haven’t been in the healthcare realm for a long time? 

Adam: Yes, actually, I do have one person working with me. I was used to two but now I just have the one under me. It’s definitely been a little challenging, but on the other hand, I feel that being so regulated and knowing what’s expected of you, in a lot of ways it’s just checking boxes. Just making sure that you’re compliant with all the current regulations. It’s always a challenge with anything like that, whereas you have many people doing many different things, and it’s keeping them all following protocol to stay secure, you know, that type of focus is challenging for sure. 

Muna: Okay, and Mike talked about regulation and compliance. I assume that’s the same across your organization, but is there something to do with legacy solutions or supporting different software and systems that makes it a little bit more challenging on your day-to-day? 

Adam: Yes, we have quite a lot of testing equipment, different imaging equipment that scans retinas, lenses, every part of your eye. A lot of that has been around for quite a while and not many changes have been made to the equipment. So, we end up with situations where it was designed for, you know, Windows 7 or even earlier than that. There’s the challenge of integrating it into a system and network connecting it, but finding a way to do it securely. There are always workarounds that we have to find, but it’s also just the way that it works because this equipment is upwards of $30,000 to $60,000 to replace. The firm is not going to find that as a solution when there could be a workaround. So, that’s always a daily battle, but it’s always an interesting battle. 

Muna: And do you also feel that from your organization it’s a 24/7 support? 

Adam: Yes and no. We do have doctors that are on call over weekends and overnight on a schedule, but that doesn’t happen that often because we have a Level One Trauma Center really nearby our main location. Most of the time, if people have something like that, they go there. But we do have emergency surgeries and procedures that need to be done, so there are times when I’ll get a call at any given time because they’re having an issue with something they’re using at that moment. 

Muna: And if we’re to look at some of the trends in healthcare, Mike, from your end, again 33 years, you’ve probably seen it all. What are some of the emerging trends that you are seeing in the past year and the upcoming year that you’ve needed to either budget for or plan? 

Mike: I think the key trends that we face right now are more integration. I see more middleware and more integration than I’ve ever seen in my career, particularly with electronic health records sending patient information, prescription information to our machines to be dispensed. The criticality of those interfaces being up and running is significant. For example, three years ago, we had a total of about 50 facilities out of our 220 that were integrated. Now, we have 170 out of 220 that are integrated. The thing driving this is really regulatory by government payment agencies, Medicare, and Medicaid in the US. They are actually paying our customers better reimbursement rates if they are electronically integrated than if they’re using paper or faxing. Believe it or not, faxing is still a very prevalent legacy technology in our world, and nobody would love to get rid of it more than I would. The other thing that I think we’re going to start seeing, and this is really a crystal ball thing, is artificial intelligence getting involved. Now, healthcare is not an industry, particularly post-acute care where we operate, that is on the leading edge. We tend to wait until things are past the cycle and more mature before we pick them up. I think there will be a lot of opportunities for artificial intelligence in the area of reimbursement, our accounts receivable side, and situations where we have multiple different payers for products we deliver. Being able to integrate with those products more readily without adding human resources to deal with them is significant. Reimbursements are always being driven down in the US. Our healthcare is not nationalized, and so all the government payers, Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans Administration, as well as the insurance companies, are driving down the cost of what they’re willing to reimburse. The only way we can keep our profit margin good is to figure out where we can take cost out of the equation, whether that be the medications we buy and distribute, our vendor partners on various services such as IT services, or whether we can do things more efficiently. I think that is where AI will really drive significant change in the next two to five years in our industry.

Muna: Amazing. And obviously, we also talk about where AI might meet you within tools like Atera when you’re looking at IT and technology in a minute. Adam, from your end, what are you seeing as some of the current trends in healthcare? 

Adam: Well, what I’ve definitely seen here and then I’ve heard of in the area, kind of following suit, is that a lot of these practices are transitioning from remote support MSP kind of support situation to an in-house person or people. It’s mostly due to keeping patient care and clinic flow moving. That was always a challenge here. Before I started, they had a remote support company that they worked with, and there were always delays. It was just too much for them to write off, so they ended up hiring me, and I’ve since created a team. But that was one of the biggest transitions that I’ve heard of and seen. Years ago, I thought it was probably going to move more towards all MSP support. It seemed to be the trend, but I think we’ve dialed that back a little bit and realized that there’s a human aspect that’s needed. Well, not that if you’re an MSP, you’re not human, but onsite face-to-face help where you’re sitting at a desk where they can go and grab you is something that’s important. Also, the faster resolution response needed was the main factor in that change. That’s the major transition that I’ve seen. As far as AI that you were speaking of, I don’t feel that there’s much push to move in that direction here anyways. I wouldn’t say it’s a generational thing, but I do feel that there’s a lot of hesitation from most of the providers and the doctors to add that type of feature. Even though I try to explain to them that it’s not what you see in a movie, it’s something that will just help certain aspects of your job. But there is a lot of hesitation for sure. 

Muna: Interesting. It’s really interesting to see the difference. What comes to me is that it depends on the healthcare institute, the service you’re offering, the people you’re working with, and how you’re getting reimbursed for whatever technologies you put in place. That will probably determine how much budget you’re willing to put in to either become more efficient, automate, save costs in certain areas. That’s where Mike, for example, said tools like AI and AI technology in certain realms would help optimize. I’d love to hear about what a day in the life looks like for each of you. Maybe we’ll start with you, Mike. What does a day in the life of an IT director look like in an organization that’s so distributed? 

Mike: Certainly, there are no quiet days. As I moved up the ladder in the industry, I quickly found that with each jump, there’s a lot more to worry about and take care of. Typically, my days are filled with a lot of meetings around strategy, taking care of issues, creating plans to resolve issues that take more effort than just a desktop support type situation. I typically arrive at the office bright and early, 7:30 AM. I’m usually the first person in the building, so I can get all prepared before the first meetings start or before various endeavors need to happen. It also helps me catch up from the night before if I haven’t been called the night before on something. I am very much hands-on; I get calls after hours, weekends, holidays if major things happen. We have to dispense the drugs, we have to deliver the drugs to our customers, so if there’s network issues or anything, I’m notified during the night by our technical support. During the day, most of my time, I probably spend 30 to 50% of my week in meetings, working with peers, leadership, my team to make sure we’re moving on the right endeavors and priorities. It’s very important for us to prioritize; there are more things to do than there are people always. I check our ticket queue every morning when I first log in to see if anything’s lingering that needs to be escalated within my team or MSP. I even handle invoices that come in monthly for our various IT services and send them to the accounts payable group. Email is very much a heavy usage for me, probably 200 to 250 a day. Some people try to send you projects over email instead of discussing them. We also have instant messaging, so I’m often on there regularly. All of our leadership has my cell phone. A day in my life is really just making sure things are moving forward and that there’s nothing serious I need to report to my leadership team or that didn’t get resolved from the night before. 

Muna: Thank you for that. Adam, we’d love to hear about what a day in the life for you looks like, especially since you did transition from another industry into this position. Tell us a little bit about what that looks like and if there really is a difference. 

Adam: First, I want to apologize for my technical issues. That’s part of my daily job, I guess. In general, I don’t feel like there’s a stark contrast in daily work per se, but I do think that the fight to keep 100% uptime throughout the clinic hours is the main difference. You have to drop anything to make sure that the patient flow is kept up because everything is scheduled down to the minute. A certain piece of equipment is used for a patient at a set time. If the patient comes in late, sometimes that creates issues. That’s the only real difference in a daily aspect. Other than that, I’m similar to Mike at this point in my career. I’ve realized that it’s a lot more planning, meetings, and emailing than I ever expected. We also use instant messaging, we use MS Teams for as much as possible, which is helpful because I’m not checking multiple different portals. I didn’t realize how many reports I was going to pull every day. Keeping people up to speed on the health of your systems is very important in healthcare because they want to feel confident that everything’s going to work tomorrow when a patient comes in. 

Muna: Interesting. If someone is now looking to you and asking what are some of those changes that you’ve experienced over the last couple of years and what does it take to actually get into healthcare IT, I’d love to hear some of your tips. These might be younger people that are just coming into the realm of IT. Why should they consider healthcare IT? Mike, maybe you can start. 

Mike: Sure. 

Adam: I’ll go first this time. Be ready to be more flexible. Hopefully, you’re already a flexible person if you want to get into healthcare, but the standards and expectations are constantly evolving. If you’re too set in your ways, it could be a complication because there are a lot of hands-on roles. As far as expert tips, if you’re heading up a team, take the time to find the correct candidates. I probably can’t overstress that enough. You can put a team together, but if it’s the wrong fit, you will have a really hard time. I’ve been on both sides of it, but as a managerial position, it is a daily battle to keep everybody happy. Even though your job should be IT, you’re also kind of a psychiatrist to help everybody and keep them happy. So, finding the right people to work with and taking the extra time to do that will make you a lot happier. That’s all I have for that. 

Muna: Thank you. Mike, from your end?

Mike: If we talk about the change through the years in IT, one thing that I’ve seen in recent years is everything getting much more integrated, much more electronic. I think we’ve lagged behind verticals such as finance and banking institutions in particular. I think we’ve lagged behind retail also. We’re just now getting into a maturity level in understanding what our data can tell us about patient care, what it can tell us about outcomes, and such things as what drugs put a patient at risk for falls—various things that can send them back to the hospital, which is very costly to our post-acute care organizations. So, I’m seeing a lot more effort towards integrations, towards technology, electronic documents versus paper documents, and more collaboration than what I’ve seen in the past. I feel like IT has collaborated for many years, but I feel like it’s just now getting to the C-level in organizations such as mine, and it’s become a very big thing recently. Another big change is we’re seeing a lot of consolidation in healthcare, with bigger organizations taking over smaller ones. I would hazard a guess that in Adam’s organization, a lot of those providers had single practices and are now working with Wilmington Eye, for example. We’re seeing the same thing in the post-acute care space and in the pharmacy institutional space. As far as advice for getting into healthcare IT, like any other IT career, it’s a continual learning curve. You have to continue to learn new things, be willing to learn new things, and you can’t really rest on your laurels. If there’s one thing that I’ve done in my career, it’s that I’ve continued to try to educate myself and learn new things. When I look back 10 years ago, I was primarily in software and integrations, and I’ve had to learn managing an MSP, moving things to the private cloud, managing desktops, and managing a technical support group for our automated dispensing units in all the sites. Just be prepared for a continual learning curve. One thing I would tell you if you’re considering getting into healthcare IT is that it’s a great market to get into because people will always need care. In the US in particular, we have 10,000 people in my age group every year that are moving into retirement, which drives up the business level of our post-acute care facilities that we service. I’ve spent my entire career in a vertical market that is post-acute care, both from a provider standpoint as well as a pharmacy standpoint for the last 12 years. It’s a very secure and stable market, and we are just now hitting our stride with some of the technologies available. Be prepared that you may work some weekends and holidays, and that’s just part of the gig. I have a feeling that a lot of you are doing that today. IT has never been a true 8-to-5 blue-collar job. 

Muna: We hear it all the time, and recently I was looking at some research that shows 27% of employers are looking for IT experts this year, and the numbers seem to be growing year-over-year. From your perspective as leadership, is it because people are shifting away from IT, or is there a need for more expertise? What is making it so challenging to find those experts in IT and data management? 

Mike: I’ll start on that. There are a lot of factors influencing this. I think the number one factor is there aren’t enough IT people graduating from colleges today. Another issue is the trend to outsource IT efforts to offshore in the late 90s and early 2000s, which drove a lot of added demand. A lot of the people we were outsourcing with were not as knowledgeable about the healthcare business, so we had to augment the staff with both on-site staff and added staff for the projects we were doing offshore. Companies are now starting to realize that without a good technology strategy and a good digital transformation strategy, they will be left behind by their competitors eventually. This is driving a lot of additional IT positions. More and more companies have gotten heavily invested in IT research, development, and deployment. This trend is not going to go away. It really got heavy when the internet first started maturing, but now it’s getting even heavier as we look at the value of data in our organizations, artificial intelligence, electronic document management—all these things are converging and driving a large demand for IT people. There just really are not enough good qualified candidates to staff all the open positions, and that’s been a trend for many years now. For example, .NET developers—there are more .NET developer positions open in the US and likely in the world than there really are .NET developers. 

Muna: Thank you for that, Mike. Adam, one of our attendees, Ed Roland, shared with us that he now works in education IT but has a real offer on the table for a health-related position. He’s contemplating and considering whether it’s the right approach to make the switch. What would you say as someone who did make a switch? 

Adam: I’d say that we all have pros and cons as far as cultural changes that will happen. It’s hard to say just from education to healthcare because there are a lot of different factors in between. In general, I have friends who work in education IT, and they seem to be always frustrated, so I’m thinking it would be a good transition for you. It will probably be a little more hours from what I hear because of summers being off, whatever. I am jealous of the friends I was speaking of that have some summertime off. Other than that, you would be doing about the same thing for the most part, as long as you’re keeping up to date with the different trends and changes of HIPAA and any other compliance rules that you might come across. 

Muna: So definitely education and continuously learning and keeping up with technologies seems to be key across IT. If we talk about technology, Mike, what are you seeing as essentials in the tech stack for healthcare today? 

Mike: Certainly, if you’re running a distributed organization such as we are, you have to think about how to easily deploy your software and applications and updates. In my opinion, the number one essential in healthcare if you’re running distributed locations like we are is Citrix or VMware, so you can host your applications and the end-user device is not unique per device. That’s the best way that we handle having 500 endpoints—by managing our primary applications through a deployment strategy that utilizes Citrix and VMware. You can’t have unique desktops per user. That’s a key essential. Another essential is standardizing on a single database platform. I came from an organization where we had nearly every database platform known to man, and it was very hard to integrate things. It was very costly to have a DBA for Microsoft SQL, Oracle, DB2 on a mainframe environment, and at one point we had Essbase on another partner system. Pick a platform and stick with it. We picked Microsoft as our platform for development and database and have stuck with that. We do not bring in systems that have other databases. Additionally, having repeatable deployment processes for your workstations, laptops, new phones, desktops, mobile devices, cell phones, tablets, and software is crucial. You need to be able to deploy software without it taking a week of effort—to deploy it in an early morning while things are quieter and be done with it in a couple of hours across multiple locations. Remote deployment is key for everything from your hardware to your software and integrations. 

Muna: Thank you, Mike. Adam, from your end, what are some of the essentials there? I’m sure some are similar to what Mike shared with us. 

Adam: Yes, Mike pretty much touched all the bullet points I had here. Consolidating to a centralized solution is definitely going to make your life a lot easier. As far as reporting the health of that system it makes it a lot easier because you’ve got all your eggs in one basket, for the most part. That is definitely a top priority. Another thing I would suggest, and this isn’t just a healthcare IT suggestion, but moving your backbone to the cloud or AWS or anything cloud-based. I didn’t realize how much that was going to make it easier to sleep at night, knowing that someone else was monitoring our domain controller or our app server. It’s another set of eyes on it. It’s not that I spend any less time; I just spend a lot less time worrying about it. All those worries go away. There are other worries, obviously, that come up, but I think it’s a good tradeoff and makes your life a lot easier and a lot less stressful. Also, having a good system like Atera is crucial. I’ve used many different ones. I obviously prefer Atera now, but having a system like that in place—an all-in-one integrated package—is a huge timesaver. It makes it so that you’re able to give much better care and support to all your users. Having ticketing built in and all the different features is beneficial. I’ve never been in a situation where it was all-in-one. I’ve worked with Enable, Ninja RMM, and a whole bunch of different ones, and it was always that they didn’t do everything. You had to go into this portal for one thing and that portal for another, and it ended up wasting a lot of time. Finding a solution that works for you, which for me was Atera, definitely saved a lot of time and made it so that I could give better support. 

Muna: Thank you for that, Adam. I appreciate your support and your continued business with Atera. That leads me back to you, Mike. How do you prioritize IT projects, considering budget constraints? And when selecting vendors such as Atera, what are some of the considerations you look at in the realm of healthcare to ensure that it’s the right vendor for you? 

Mike: When you talk about prioritizing projects, the main thing for me is presenting something to leadership that has a return on investment in a timely manner. I’ll be honest; we hardly ever do anything that doesn’t pay for itself within three years. We will just put it on the table if it doesn’t because there are plenty of things we can find that do pay for themselves in a year or less, two years, three years. That’s what we really focus on. We don’t do IT for the sake of IT. For example, I don’t have a migration plan to Windows 11 right now. I know I’m going to have to come up with it, but our leadership and ownership right now could probably care less about that compared to other things we’ve got going. We prioritize things based on business need and value. Does it differentiate us from someone else, or does it have an ROI that’s pretty quick? We are a privately held company, so the budget is always going to be a challenge. We’re not a huge organization with billions of dollars. I would piggyback on Adam’s comments about Atera. It did allow us to easily support both our employees and our devices from afar. For what we paid for it versus other solutions we looked at before, it’s a great value and the reason we chose to go there. We also make sure that any new software request goes through someone at my level or above to be approved. We don’t let our 350 employees have their own preference of what they run. We have a standard software offering that we distribute to our people. If they want to add something new, it has to go through an approval process and a vetting process, which also ties into projects and vendors. We consider how long the vendor has been in business, if they are big enough to support an organization like ours, or if they are what I call a garage band—two or three people in a garage somewhere created it. Not making fun of Apple there, but the truth is you get good contracts with people, you make sure they honor those contracts, and you make sure you have business associate agreements so they can’t poach your people or share private HIPAA information outside of your organization. There’s a lot that goes into contracting with people in a healthcare organization and choosing vendors. I suspect the choosing vendor part is very strict for most industries because you don’t want to do business with somebody that started up six months ago and may be here tomorrow or may not be here in 18 months. 

Muna: Definitely, and we have another question here from the audience which I think we touched on very early in the conversation about how much does SOC and HIPAA compliance play a role when you’re selecting a solution. How important is it for healthcare institutions? I’ll let Adam go first and then I’ll follow. 

Adam: That would be my first criterion that I would have to check off all the boxes for before I went any further. If it isn’t compliant or if it’s going to be a challenge to make it compliant, it ends up being more trouble than it’s worth. Every situation is different, but that’s definitely the first thing I go to because I know that’s the first question I’m going to be asked by my superiors—everyone covering their butt kind of thing. Whether it be with equipment or policies, compliance is crucial. 

Muna: Thank you for that, Adam. Mike? 

Mike: My organization is private, so SOC doesn’t really affect us. However, I worked in a healthcare organization that had to be SOC compliant, and I was actually one of the key contributors to that project. Even though we’re private today, we have set up Alixa RX in a manner that it would be SOC compliant and able to go public at some point if we chose to do so. I’m very familiar with Sarbanes-Oxley and the ramifications there, which are predominantly audit ramifications that have been enhanced. We are audited every year, and I play a heavy role in that being the leader of IT for our organization. Just like any other corporation, SOC is something that we have to think about. We’re not held to it from a standpoint of being privately owned, but my leadership team and I are very focused on it. We all come from organizations that were Sarbanes-Oxley compliant, so we continue to do our best to make sure that if someday we did decide to do a public offering, we would be ready in a matter of weeks to be certified and ready to go. 

Muna: Thank you for that. I have another question about how do you approach training and upskilling of your team given the rapid pace of technological changes in healthcare? 

Adam: For me, certifications and training programs are essential. Just about everything has its own training program that you can have your people work on. I don’t feel that a college education, like a bachelor’s in IT, is the way to go, or taking multiple classes for certifications. A lot of it is right in front of you. There has been a renaissance of free ways to learn just about everything. When it comes to training and being up to speed on new changes, that’s something I leave to my people to do on their own. Obviously, I monitor what they’re moving on to, but as an IT person, you kind of have to do that in your own time anyway. If your job’s done correctly at the end of the day, I don’t really care how you got to it or how you did it. If you can learn how something is going to change or have a plan for what you’re going to do when it does change, I’m happy with that. 

Muna: Do you take a similar approach, Mike? 

Mike: I really do take a similar approach. Budgets are tough, and education for employees, conferences, certifications are just not something we budget for annually. My advice is similar to Adam’s: invest in yourself and invest in education. But I’ll take it a little further. It’s not just IT that needs training and mentoring. One of the things we do is facilitate train-the-trainer sessions for the leadership at remote locations when we’re rolling out new technology or software. We also have a very active operations department that partners with my department to do screenshots and training for the systems used by everyone from our technical support to the actual end users at all our locations. Training is a very big part and should be a big part of any organization of any size. So, I would echo what Adam says but also go a little further to emphasize that all employees need training, not just IT. 

Muna: Thank you for that. We could continue talking here for another hour; there’s a lot to learn from you both and many interesting elements in IT in the state of healthcare. We have come to the end of this webinar session. I really want to thank you both for your time, your insights, and for sharing a day in the life of your organization. Thank you so much. If you have any final words that you want to share with our audience? 

Adam: Yeah, actually, I will say that as far as public speaking, I’m sure everyone can tell it’s not my forte. What’s going on in my brain is going a lot faster than the words I can put out, but I think that Mike was a lot more eloquent and said almost all the things that I would have said. I appreciate that. I’m more hands-on than I am speaking, but I’m glad to share whatever I can in the best way that I can. Thank you all for listening. 

Muna: Of course, we were happy to have you. 

Mike: I would say to all of you, I did tell Muna at the beginning of the call that I was happy for my email to be shared out. I will warn you, I tend to be a very busy guy, so if I don’t get to you in 24 hours, just know that I will get to you. I do answer my emails. The other thing I noticed is that Gordon had put out a question about how do you validate compliance in your vendors. In Alixa, we typically look for vendors that have operated in this space with other companies similar to ours so we know they’re used to the healthcare vertical. We very rarely do business with somebody that has not worked with the healthcare industry. We also look for vendors of size and scale that we know can support our compliance needs and follow them. In addition to that, we do business associate agreements with all of our vendors that talk about HIPAA and the need for compliance. They all have to sign off and agree on those contracts before we will do business with them. Thank you all for having me today. It was a pleasure talking about this with everybody. Who doesn’t love to talk about themselves? 

Muna: I want to thank you both. This has been very informative. I’ll remind the audience that this is being recorded and that we have a short survey. If you don’t mind, for those that are still with us, please answer it. A final note: under the document section, we have a document about healthcare IT and what you can learn from some of the technologies out there. Again, thank you everyone. Thank you, gentlemen, for joining us and wishing you a great rest of the day. Bye everyone. 

Mike: Thank you. 

Adam: Thank you. 

Muna: Bye all.