The Cost of Bad Advice
In addition to downtime and broken systems, there is another cost that most medical practices don’t consider: the cost of bad advice when an inexperienced or unethical consultant recommends a product, service or project that is unnecessary or incorrect for your specific situation.
Sometimes bad advice is due to sheer ignorance and inexperience. Sometimes it’s because the IT company is knowingly trying to keep the price down (so you’ll say yes and buy from them), recommending a substandard product or solution just to get the sale. Sometimes they’re selling you top-of-the-line solutions but installing cheap products and shortcuts to pad their bottom line.
Very often, IT companies and technicians choose simple solutions they are familiar with and can easily manage instead of the best solution for the problem, which may require expertise they don’t have or additional setup, support and maintenance they don’t want to do.
For example, we could lock your front door with standard locks, and it would work to keep some people out – but not an experienced, determined criminal. A better solution would be dead bolts and a home security system that is complete with motion detectors, cameras and glass-break technology. Setting that up requires more work, and your home needs to be monitored, but if you want to make sure no one breaks in when your family is sleeping or while you’re away on vacation, that’s the type of system you need.
Another form of bad advice is when an IT consultant lacks experience in solving a problem, grossly underestimating the time and money it will take to successfully complete a project. When a consultant makes this mistake, your project ends up way over schedule, costing you two to three times as much in unexpected fees to get it done. Believe it or not, a lot of IT people are NOT very good at planning.
It’s gotten so bad that Network World recently noted, “Increasingly, IT customers are crying malpractice and railing against slipped implementation schedules, compounded consulting fees, and disappointing product performance.”
Here’s a list of other ways bad IT advice can cost you:
- You can end up paying for unnecessary services, software, hardware and consulting fees and STILL not get the solution or results you wanted.
- You can pay for IT maintenance but still be left wide open to a ransomware attack, with no means for getting your data back except by paying the ransom and hoping you get your data back.
- The above will also cost you THOUSANDS in emergency data restoration services. You cannot just “unlock” your data. Someone has to comb through your files and devices to ensure the hackers haven’t planted another virus to ransom your network again in the future (after all, you’ve demonstrated you’re a paying customer). You might need to rebuild your network from a backup, which can take weeks. Don’t underestimate the devastating costs and losses from one attack!
- Handling the public relations nightmare of your clients’ data being exposed via a breach and having to notify your clients that you exposed their personal data, medical files, credit cards, e-mail, etc., to hackers.
- Compliance and data breach violations and fines. Every state is instituting stronger rules about what every business – from a solo entrepreneur to a major corporation – must have in place to protect private information; and private information isn’t just medical records and financial data, but also e-mail addresses, birthdays, social security numbers, mailing addresses, phone numbers and more. Neglect to put proper protections in place and you could end up being slapped with fines and legal fees to defend yourself.
- Getting stuck with a “solution” that doesn’t really solve your problems, wasting time and money, forcing you to start over, again.
- Paying double by having a competent IT consultant fix what the other person messed up or complete the project you originally wanted done (and paid for).
- Throwing away all the time and money you put into a project you’ve paid big money for because the solution was too complicated to actually use and employees either couldn’t use it or refused to use it (this happens with custom development all of the time).
- Incurring litigation costs to get your money back from a technician who ripped you off or failed to deliver on a contracted service.
- Dealing with the sheer frustration of the problems resulting from poor advice.
The trouble is, it’s hard to know when you’re paying for bad advice until you are already neck-deep in the problems and it’s too late. By the time you suspect that you’ve hired the wrong person, you’ve already invested a considerable amount of time and money, making it difficult, if not impossible, to end the project and look for someone else.
Worse yet, IF you do get breached, you’ll be scrambling to find someone else to help you put all the pieces back together again, forced to make another quick decision on who to trust under pressure and having to throw more money at someone, hoping they’ll do the right thing.
That’s why Tier3MD is the right choice to maintain, monitor and protect your network.
