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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%).


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%).


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

Hot Topics

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...