While familiarity is understandable in the healthcare sector, it creates more problems than solutions in the long term. Legacy infrastructure – an umbrella term for outdated services, tech, and policies – is not just a performance concern, but a time one too. Time is already a strained resource in the healthcare sector, with clinicians and doctors overwhelmed with paperwork, administrative demands, and regulatory concerns.
As we’ve also discussed previously in our article on upgrading legacy infrastructure, the medical sector is in dire need of new, retainable staff, especially nurses. What this perpetuates is a system of severe labor concerns and time constraints. Legacy infrastructure adds to this problem. But, it’s not only a matter of lost time – it puts a medical patient’s health at risk too.
We’ve discussed reasons for shifting away from your legacy infrastructure. Now, we’ll discuss why it’s dangerous for staff, your practice, and your patient base.
The risks of legacy infrastructure
As mentioned, time is everything. Any small delay, any interruption in services puts a patient’s condition at risk. It stretches beyond a local practice – hospitals and emergency care services need agile, responsive tech to address immediate patient concerns and health changes.
But upgrading away from legacy infrastructure is easier said than done. How healthcare IT addresses the legacy hardware and software can lead to additional time lost, continuous errors, and a Jenga tower of unstable resources. If an aspect of the infrastructure fails, it can cause a cascade effect for other healthcare services. For example, nurses cannot access a terminal to log patient data, patient treatment is delayed, and their condition worsens.
If new tech services are integrated into the healthcare organization, legacy infrastructure can cause friction. Older apps and software have less compatibility, for instance, or will make older systems obsolete entirely.
There are several key weaknesses of older infrastructure, which have varying – but severe – organization-level impacts. Hardware is the first that comes to mind. Doctors and clinicians rely on computer systems to manage tasks, record data, and access patient information. Older hardware is susceptible to performance slowdown and hardware failure.
Older software also presents a problem, and worse, can affect more systems since said software is used in all relevant medical terminals or devices. They present a cybersecurity risk too, as older software/operating systems lack updates to mitigate modern IT threats.
Why do medical organizations feel challenged to update their legacy infrastructure?
It is not a simple matter to shift away from older tech, despite its serious importance in the medical industry. There are various barriers to updating legacy systems to modernized infrastructure, bogging down healthcare organizations.
Cost
Any organization, especially healthcare, has to consider how cost-intensive new resources are. Shifting away from legacy infrastructure, unfortunately, does carry a capital investment depending on the scope of the update. Paired with regulatory requirements (HIPAA), a healthcare organization has to be mindful of how it spends and what it spends on.
Newly injected software, for instance, has a range of implications. It takes time to update from old to new, and, staff must be trained on its use. Additionally, it may require additional certifications on the IT side, while checking for security standards and HIPAA requirements. In this process, how long does it take, not only to integrate the new software into the medical organization’s work structure but to learn it too?
Time and Training
This brings us to the next point, the time sink required with newer infrastructure. Not all systems, software, and hardware have the same demands, but with complexity comes training. Staff and IT need to familiarize themselves with new procedures, which takes time from their usual work tasks.
Furthermore, you have to take staff stress, fatigue, and burnout into consideration. Do you have the available bandwidth to dedicate training time? Also, consider the level of expertise needed for training and the introduction of new infrastructure. Will it require IT experts?
Not all medical practices have a medical IT staff on standby, so new hires (long or short-term) can be costly. Some providers circumvent this by utilizing third parties and MSPs (managed service providers). But it’s still an investment of time and money, with resources not every medical practice has.
However, it does not change the growing need to move forward and away from legacy systems.
It’s necessary in the long term
No doubt, with time, cost, and training existing as major obstacles towards legacy upgrades, it’s no wonder medical organizations stay with the old and familiar. Unfortunately, the risk exceeds the long-term “value” of legacy, warranting a change sooner rather than later. But the challenges remain, so what can healthcare practices do?
Change isn’t necessary for the sake of it – but it is when it puts patient health at risk and runs the danger of total system failure. So, IT and healthcare leaders need to consider upgrades in increments versus complete overhauls. To do so, you need a plan of action with achievable goals in practical timeframes.
Example: Replacing all operating systems with modern versions within 3 months.
Understand the benefits of that situation: a new OS has better compatibility, security, and speed. Therefore, in practice, an organization needs to assess how beneficial it is to upgrade legacy infrastructure.
A more practical and expedited fix towards updating legacy infrastructure is investing in modernized resources. Software solutions, for example, can alleviate some of the burdens involved with medical care.
Consider dictation software as a tool, for instance. Dictation software like Dragon Medical One addresses both legacy concerns and the time-demanding nature of health records. Clinicians, nurses, and doctors spend hours on medical documentation, hampered by legacy infrastructure. But dictation software is an agile platform and part of modernized IT, since it improves performance, working with compatible devices and operating systems.
Introducing cost-effective tech, then, helps shift away from legacy infrastructure without crippling healthcare budgets.
Conclusion
Prioritizing patient health means using agile tools and expertise. The healthcare industry often struggles with onboarding staff and upgrading, however, so the challenge is understandable. Therefore, cost-conscious solutions can help save thousands in the long term
For more information about the Dragon Medical One dictation software, reach out or start your risk-free trial now.
