Why Healthcare Providers Need to Address Technical Debt

Technical debt in healthcare organizations can significantly impact the quality, speed and convenience of care delivery. While technology has facilitated advances in care — especially outside hospital walls — excessive technical debt from legacy systems can undermine these gains.

Rather than leveraging technology for efficiency, cost reduction and innovation, IT departments burdened with legacy systems spend considerable time on troubleshooting and maintenance. This is especially concerning given the IT staffing shortages facing providers and the need for lean teams that can maximize productivity.

The consequences of technical debt extend beyond the IT department, potentially affecting patient care and safety. Legacy systems and poorly integrated solutions hinder the ability of clinicians to make timely, accurate and data-informed decisions. Often, outdated tools prevent healthcare organizations from taking advantage of capabilities such as automation and artificial intelligence, which can further reduce error-prone manual processes.

Technical debt also increases cybersecurity vulnerabilities, making it more challenging and time-consuming to monitor and respond to threats. Outdated software may have known weaknesses that hackers can exploit. The sophistication of today’s cyberattacks requires modern, automated security solutions to quickly identify and mitigate potential threats.

From a business perspective, technical debt is resource-intensive, requiring more time and money for continual patching, updating and troubleshooting. This inefficiency leads to cumbersome workflows just to maintain the environment, leaving little to no capacity for innovation to drive strategic outcomes. Moreover, technical debt can hurt employee morale, making it even more difficult to hire and retain clinicians and technology professionals.

Home healthcare provider Amedisys significantly reduced its technical debt by using CDW’s Intel vPro® Activation service to enable remote management of its fleet of laptops. The Intel vPro® platform has some functionality out of the box, but remote management capabilities must be activated manually so that organizations can configure it for their environment and specific security requirements. Intel partnered with organizations such as CDW to help customers with the process.

Before activating Intel vPro®, the Amedisys IT team had accrued considerable technical debt in managing the company’s thousands of laptops, located in offices throughout the country. When devices malfunctioned, IT team members had to schedule remote troubleshooting sessions with end users, ensure devices were turned on and operating systems were operational, and then arrange to have laptops shipped off for servicing if problems couldn’t be fixed remotely. The process was clunky and disruptive.

With Intel vPro®, the support team gained out-of-band access, enabling remote management almost anytime. IT team members can patch, update and reimage systems, set up encryption and perform other tasks with minimal impact on end users, even if a hard drive has crashed.

IT staffers can communicate with devices at the hardware level with Intel vPro®, ensuring support is always available, provided the device is connected to power and the internet. These capabilities allow Amedisys’s Tier 2 support team to resolve issues quickly, reducing downtime for staffers handling time-sensitive tasks such as patient care scheduling.

Staff shortages remain one of the most critical challenges facing healthcare providers. A sound IT strategy for reducing technical debt can significantly enhance employee efficiency and effectiveness, allowing workers to do more with less.

By streamlining day-to-day workflows, providers can reduce much of the friction that contributes to poor morale. In addition, modernizing solutions enables providers to leverage advanced technologies that can further reduce debt, creating a cycle that improves outcomes for organizations, clinicians and patients.