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Healthcare IT Teams Face Multiple Challenges

Destiny Bertucci
Auvik

Information technology serves as the digital backbone for doctors, nurses, and technicians to deliver quality patient care by sharing data and applications over secure IT networks. To help understand the top IT trends that are impacting the healthcare industry today, Auvik recently released a companion analysis for its 2024 IT Trends Report which analyzed survey responses from 2,000 IT professionals from North America and the UK, and compared results from professionals working in the healthcare industry to the larger sample. The report found that IT teams face multiple technical obstacles in their support for healthcare organizations.

Surprisingly, just 38% of IT professionals tracked end-user satisfaction as their top measure of success this year, down from 45% in 2023. Yet healthcare IT professionals spent more time responding to end-user requests compared to their IT peers in other industries. Almost three-fourths of healthcare IT pros (72%) spent 10 to 20 hours per week on these tasks, compared to less than two-thirds of overall IT professionals (64%).

Due to the increase in remote and hybrid work since the pandemic, less than 10% of internal IT teams said they still support a fully onsite workforce. But due to the human-touch aspects of the medical profession, healthcare IT professionals reported that 16% of their organizations still maintain completely onsite work environments. As a result, healthcare IT teams are more likely to maintain on-premises infrastructure.

Gaining Greater SaaS Visibility into the Network

Another surprising finding from the survey is the frequency with which healthcare IT teams back up network configurations compared to IT teams in other industries. Only 18% of healthcare IT respondents said they back up their networks daily, versus 27% across other sectors. Failing to perform backups regularly could lead to problems with data quality and network performance, and with resuming normal operations in the wake of a security incident or other network outage.

To be fair, 73% of healthcare IT environments still depend on aging legacy operating systems, according to data from HIMSS.org, and many of those networks host complex medical devices that require specialized management. In addition, implementing daily backups in healthcare can be logistically challenging due to the need for careful scheduling to avoid disruptions in patient care.

Another challenge involves the need for visibility into all cloud-based SaaS applications that run on the network, because IT professionals can't protect what they can't see. More than one-fourth of healthcare IT professionals reported having zero visibility into employees who shared accounts for SaaS applications (27%), which raises concerns about data security, privacy, and HIPAA regulatory compliance.

Unfortunately, it is a common practice in the healthcare industry for multiple employees such as nurses or admins to share a single security login for shared workstations. This practice introduces risks for unauthorized access and data breaches, particularly when employees fail to log out before leaving a workstation. It also allows former employees to maintain access to sensitive patient data after they have been offboarded.

To strengthen network visibility and security, IT teams can implement SaaS monitoring tools to automatically track accounts and activities across the entire organization. Another step involves hardening access controls to ensure that only authorized people are able to log into sensitive systems.

Closing the Talent Gap for Healthcare IT

Cost and budgetary constraints are always a concern for any IT team, however according to this year's finding, budget ranks as only the sixth biggest challenge for healthcare IT professionals. The top challenge for more than half of respondents involved a shortage of skilled IT professionals in the workforce (56%). That skills gap was followed closely by challenges involving network infrastructure and performance (50%); network visibility (49%); security and compliance (47%); and configuration management (39%).

Image removed.

In the healthcare field, IT networks are typically made up of multiple layers of interconnected webs, as most hospitals and clinics run separate networks for patient care, surgery centers, pharmacies, and labs. Other external IT functions may include support for insurance and billing, visitor Wi-Fi hubs, or applications for visiting physicians and therapists.

Of course, network security remains a central concern for healthcare IT teams. Over the coming year, healthcare IT professionals cited data loss prevention tools (51%), access-to-control tools (48%), and anomaly detection tools (47%) as their top choices to improve network security. Such tools highlight the importance of safeguarding patient data by monitoring network activity for unusual behavior, and managing user access to critical systems.

From meeting data privacy regulations to coordinating complex medical treatments, healthcare professionals must continuously navigate new challenges and technologies to deliver effective patient care, and IT has become central to that mission. Healthcare IT is an evolving field that requires constant foresight and planning to develop a clear technology strategy. That's why it is critical to periodically take the pulse of IT practitioners in the field to understand their most pressing concerns, and to consider strategies and solutions that can be implemented to improve patient care and enhance network security.

Destiny Bertucci is Product Strategist at Auvik

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Healthcare IT Teams Face Multiple Challenges

Destiny Bertucci
Auvik

Information technology serves as the digital backbone for doctors, nurses, and technicians to deliver quality patient care by sharing data and applications over secure IT networks. To help understand the top IT trends that are impacting the healthcare industry today, Auvik recently released a companion analysis for its 2024 IT Trends Report which analyzed survey responses from 2,000 IT professionals from North America and the UK, and compared results from professionals working in the healthcare industry to the larger sample. The report found that IT teams face multiple technical obstacles in their support for healthcare organizations.

Surprisingly, just 38% of IT professionals tracked end-user satisfaction as their top measure of success this year, down from 45% in 2023. Yet healthcare IT professionals spent more time responding to end-user requests compared to their IT peers in other industries. Almost three-fourths of healthcare IT pros (72%) spent 10 to 20 hours per week on these tasks, compared to less than two-thirds of overall IT professionals (64%).

Due to the increase in remote and hybrid work since the pandemic, less than 10% of internal IT teams said they still support a fully onsite workforce. But due to the human-touch aspects of the medical profession, healthcare IT professionals reported that 16% of their organizations still maintain completely onsite work environments. As a result, healthcare IT teams are more likely to maintain on-premises infrastructure.

Gaining Greater SaaS Visibility into the Network

Another surprising finding from the survey is the frequency with which healthcare IT teams back up network configurations compared to IT teams in other industries. Only 18% of healthcare IT respondents said they back up their networks daily, versus 27% across other sectors. Failing to perform backups regularly could lead to problems with data quality and network performance, and with resuming normal operations in the wake of a security incident or other network outage.

To be fair, 73% of healthcare IT environments still depend on aging legacy operating systems, according to data from HIMSS.org, and many of those networks host complex medical devices that require specialized management. In addition, implementing daily backups in healthcare can be logistically challenging due to the need for careful scheduling to avoid disruptions in patient care.

Another challenge involves the need for visibility into all cloud-based SaaS applications that run on the network, because IT professionals can't protect what they can't see. More than one-fourth of healthcare IT professionals reported having zero visibility into employees who shared accounts for SaaS applications (27%), which raises concerns about data security, privacy, and HIPAA regulatory compliance.

Unfortunately, it is a common practice in the healthcare industry for multiple employees such as nurses or admins to share a single security login for shared workstations. This practice introduces risks for unauthorized access and data breaches, particularly when employees fail to log out before leaving a workstation. It also allows former employees to maintain access to sensitive patient data after they have been offboarded.

To strengthen network visibility and security, IT teams can implement SaaS monitoring tools to automatically track accounts and activities across the entire organization. Another step involves hardening access controls to ensure that only authorized people are able to log into sensitive systems.

Closing the Talent Gap for Healthcare IT

Cost and budgetary constraints are always a concern for any IT team, however according to this year's finding, budget ranks as only the sixth biggest challenge for healthcare IT professionals. The top challenge for more than half of respondents involved a shortage of skilled IT professionals in the workforce (56%). That skills gap was followed closely by challenges involving network infrastructure and performance (50%); network visibility (49%); security and compliance (47%); and configuration management (39%).

Image removed.

In the healthcare field, IT networks are typically made up of multiple layers of interconnected webs, as most hospitals and clinics run separate networks for patient care, surgery centers, pharmacies, and labs. Other external IT functions may include support for insurance and billing, visitor Wi-Fi hubs, or applications for visiting physicians and therapists.

Of course, network security remains a central concern for healthcare IT teams. Over the coming year, healthcare IT professionals cited data loss prevention tools (51%), access-to-control tools (48%), and anomaly detection tools (47%) as their top choices to improve network security. Such tools highlight the importance of safeguarding patient data by monitoring network activity for unusual behavior, and managing user access to critical systems.

From meeting data privacy regulations to coordinating complex medical treatments, healthcare professionals must continuously navigate new challenges and technologies to deliver effective patient care, and IT has become central to that mission. Healthcare IT is an evolving field that requires constant foresight and planning to develop a clear technology strategy. That's why it is critical to periodically take the pulse of IT practitioners in the field to understand their most pressing concerns, and to consider strategies and solutions that can be implemented to improve patient care and enhance network security.

Destiny Bertucci is Product Strategist at Auvik

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Industry experts offer predictions on how AI will evolve and impact technology and business in 2025. Part 2 covers the challenges presented by AI, as well as solutions to those problems ...

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E-commerce is set to skyrocket with a 9% rise over the next few years ... To thrive in this competitive environment, retailers must identify digital resilience as their top priority. In a world where savvy shoppers expect 24/7 access to online deals and experiences, any unexpected downtime to digital services can lead to significant financial losses, damage to brand reputation, abandoned carts with designer shoes, and additional issues ...

Efficiency is a highly-desirable objective in business ... We're seeing this scenario play out in enterprises around the world as they continue to struggle with infrastructures and remote work models with an eye toward operational efficiencies. In contrast to that goal, a recent Broadcom survey of global IT and network professionals found widespread adoption of these strategies is making the network more complex and hampering observability, leading to uptime, performance and security issues. Let's look more closely at these challenges ...

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The 2025 Catchpoint SRE Report dives into the forces transforming the SRE landscape, exploring both the challenges and opportunities ahead. Let's break down the key findings and what they mean for SRE professionals and the businesses relying on them ...

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Catchpoint

The pressure on IT teams has never been greater. As data environments grow increasingly complex, resource shortages are emerging as a major obstacle for IT leaders striving to meet the demands of modern infrastructure management ... According to DataStrike's newly released 2025 Data Infrastructure Survey Report, more than half (54%) of IT leaders cite resource limitations as a top challenge, highlighting a growing trend toward outsourcing as a solution ...

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Gartner revealed its top strategic predictions for 2025 and beyond. Gartner's top predictions explore how generative AI (GenAI) is affecting areas where most would assume only humans can have lasting impact ...

The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating across the telecoms industry, with 88% of fixed broadband service providers now investigating or trialing AI automation to enhance their fixed broadband services, according to new research from Incognito Software Systems and Omdia ...

 

AWS is a cloud-based computing platform known for its reliability, scalability, and flexibility. However, as helpful as its comprehensive infrastructure is, disparate elements and numerous siloed components make it difficult for admins to visualize the cloud performance in detail. It requires meticulous monitoring techniques and deep visibility to understand cloud performance and analyze operational efficiency in detail to ensure seamless cloud operations ...

Imagine a future where software, once a complex obstacle, becomes a natural extension of daily workflow — an intuitive, seamless experience that maximizes productivity and efficiency. This future is no longer a distant vision but a reality being crafted by the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence ...