On Monday, June 24, the Canadian cloud-based IT management platform Åuvik He launched his nine IT trends in healthcare to see this year. For its reportAuvik surveyed more than 2,000 IT professionals, including CEOs, systems administrators, and operations managers. Healthcare innovation I recently spoke with Auvik representatives about the survey results.
Based on survey responses, the executive summary indicated that automation was a key trend. “Automation can contribute to a better end-user experience,” the report states. Another notable point mentioned in the summary was that “a gap exists between the experiences of frontline IT operations staff and what their management perceives.”
Alex Hoff, founder and CSO of Auvik, was not particularly surprised by the survey responses. However, Hoff said there is more sensitivity around data in the healthcare field. Bob Wientzen, senior director of global communications at Auvik, said the survey results confirmed some of the key known trends. The difficulties companies are having have to do with hiring, as well as the need to find third parties for subcontracting, Wientzen added.
“Safety remains a priority,” Hoff said when asked about the differences between the current survey results and last year. “People want to do projects to drive automation and leverage third parties, but they face the challenge of finding the money to do it.”
“I think a lot of people struggle with shadow IT,” Hoff said. The concern with this is the security aspect. “Project management teams use mirror dashboards to collaborate.” There is sensitive data there, Hoff said.
The main findings of the survey were:
- Healthcare IT professionals are spending more time responding to end-user requests. Thirty-eight percent of IT professionals consider end-user satisfaction to be the most important success metric.
- The healthcare field has the highest concentration of on-site workers. After the pandemic, IT at different organizations supports remote work about 90 percent of the time. Healthcare, however, maintains the highest percentage of in-person work compared to other industries.
- Healthcare network configurations are backed up less frequently compared to other sectors. Only 18 percent of healthcare IT respondents said they backup their network daily versus 27 percent in other sectors.
- Network devices from the same vendor are the preferred choice for healthcare IT professionals. The network devices have been manufactured entirely by the same supplier for healthcare IT professionals.
- Healthcare IT teams are more likely to outsource network-related tasks than other organizations. Eighty percent of organizations rely on external partners for critical network-related tasks.
- SaaS visibility is lower in healthcare IT than in other industries. Healthcare IT professionals reported that they had no visibility into employees sharing accounts on SaaS applications.
- Automation adoption is high. Healthcare respondents reported that network and SaaS-related activities were mostly automated.
- The IT talent gap continues to widen in the healthcare sector. The healthcare field is facing staffing shortages across the board and healthcare IT is no exception.
- Network operations security remains a top concern for healthcare IT professionals. In light of recent security breaches, healthcare respondents identified data loss prevention tools, access monitoring and moderation tools, and anomaly detection tools as the most frequently used network security options or considered for 2024.
As for outsourcing, Hoff believes more people should embrace it. “I’m very much in favor of focusing on their core competencies,” Hoff said. If you want to do in-house training, that is your choice. However, that doesn’t make sense at scale, she said.
Although the trend continues towards in-person work in the healthcare sector, “more and more people are working remotely,” says Hoff. “Those resources are in the cloud.” How can you gain visibility into trusted data, such as medical images and patient records? -Hoff asked. “As more people embrace the flexibility of working remotely post-pandemic, we are seeing an impact.” People still rely on VPNs from legacy infrastructure and insecure technologies. With so many vulnerabilities, organizations want to know how to do it differently. “How do we give physicians and imaging specialists the flexibility to work remotely while maintaining a safe performance experience for them?” This is more of an issue than a trend, Hoff said.
“SaaS visibility is a little lower in the healthcare IT industry than in other industries,” Wientzen noted.
“The world has embraced the cloud,” Hoff said. “It’s easy to centralize management… as long as you don’t let people walk in the front door with incorrect passwords and without using multi-factor authentication (MFA).” It’s a no-brainer to use MFA, Hoff said. It’s also clear that you should back up your network, he added.
