3 Ways You Can Make Remote Work Really Work for Your Practice

The coronavirus outbreak has brought many businesses all over the United States to a standstill. School is canceled, sports events are postponed, most establishments are keeping their doors shut, and practically everyone is staying cooped up at home. What used to be busy districts have slowly become quieter.

Your practice may have taken a big hit amidst the pandemic, and you face the dilemma of making ends meet while keeping your employees (and the rest of the community) safe. You want to stay away from the risks, but not away from meeting your patients’ needs. Getting your office staff to work remotely may be the answer you’re looking for.

Shifting the bulk of your manpower to remote work may sound risky, unproductive, and a waste of money, but that’s only true if you’re doing it wrong. Here are 3 ways you can make remote work really work for your practice:

• 1. Give your staff stable and secure access to your network

Getting your office staff to work away from the office won’t keep your business running if they don’t have access to the files that they need and the tools that they rely on.

If your clinic uses an EHR software, giving your employees remote access isn’t enough. The access has to be stable enough for them to connect to your servers at any time and from any location. It also needs to be secure enough for all patient data to stay protected.

One of the things you can do is switch to the cloud. Migrating your EHR software to a HIPAA-compliant cloud-hosted server is a convenient, cost-efficient, and effective way to provide your staff with stable and secure access to your network. The process involves minimal downtime (if any at all), military-grade data encryption, automatic daily backups, and more.

• 2. Keep communication and collaboration open and easy

Team collaboration is a huge challenge when it comes to remote work. To ensure that your practice delivers the same high quality of service despite the distance, equip your staff with clear communications policies they should adhere to and effective collaboration tools they can use.

Depending on your practice’s needs, there’s a wide variety of tools and applications that your team can use to communicate ideas clearly and get work done smoothly. For internal communication, there’s options such as GoToMeeting and G Suite for Business. For communication with your patients, you can migrate your phone system to one that’s cloud-based so you can pick up patient calls from anywhere in the world.

• 3. Maintain, monitor, and manage your infrastructure

If you want your medical practice operations to stay smooth, stable, and secure, it’s important that you have the necessary technologies in place. Maintaining, monitoring, and managing your infrastructure comes in many forms—installing software updates, creating reliable backups, installing firewalls, monitoring performance, scaling server capacity, troubleshooting errors, etc.

These are important, but when your manpower is scattered all around the city, getting all of these done can be overwhelming for your IT staff...and that’s if you have your own IT staff in the first place. 

If you want to maintain, monitor, and manage your infrastructure but don’t have the time or resources to build your own IT team, partnering with a trusted local managed service provider (MSP) is a practical way to go. For a flat monthly rate, MSPs can provide remote and on-site services for taking care of your IT infrastructure.

High-End Technology to Keep Your Practice Running

The COVID-19 outbreak is likely making it difficult and unsafe for your practice to operate as usual, but that doesn’t mean closing up shop is the only option you have. Current IT innovations help keep your practice open and maintain the necessary precautions by allowing the majority of your workforce to safely, securely, and effectively work from home.

MG Hosting Services is a company dedicated to protecting the healthcare industry from the growing threats of cyber attacks and data theft. A practice’s first line of defense against cybercriminals, they are highly trained IT specialists and cloud engineers ready to serve the technical needs of healthcare professionals 24/7. With offsite data storage, military-grade data encryption, and full remote work support, they can prepare practices for anything that comes next. Learn more on their website, and find more posts like this one on their dedicated blog.