Technology changes so fast that IT projects are constantly on the rise. Are there any IT projects going on in your medical practice? Do you keep up with IT projects? If the answer is “no”, that is not necessarily a good thing. There are quite a few projects out there that if implemented, could save you money on your IT costs. For example. Have you been approached to move your email to Microsoft Office 365? If not, let me break it down for you why this would be a good project to implement, and how it could save you money.
Costs
The cost per mailbox is estimated around $5.00 per user per month. Just for the sake of this exercise, let’s say you have 20 users. The cost for the mailboxes will be $100 per month, $1200 per year. If you currently have a Microsoft Exchange server in your practice, moving over to Office 365 is a “no brainer”. A lot of practices frown upon the monthly recurring charges, however broken down, it is actually cheaper, while increasing productivity. Let’s say you have maintenance done on your exchange server 4 times per year, at an estimation of 4 hours at a time. Your IT folks charge you $125 per hour. That’s already $2000 per year. And that does not include any licensing, updates to the server, hardware, new backup tapes, etc. In a nutshell, if you still have an Exchange server, phase it out. You will be MUCH better in the long run.
Still have old PC’s?
A PC refresh project should be standard in all practices. All PC’s 3 years and older should be refreshed. Expensive? Maybe. Compared to slowness and lack of productivity, it may be cheaper to avoid the downtime and frustration of a slow system, than to replace it with a newer faster model at a very affordable price.
Still have servers in your office?
Old servers can kill you. The expense of having to refresh old servers almost doesn’t make any sense. With the ability to virtualize, having a bank of servers in your practice is not only non-practical, but expensive. The benefits of hosting far outweigh the benefits of having servers on site. For example…does your office have redundant generators? How fast is your internet connection? Is your office monitored with 24 hour security? Can you spin up a copy of your data in 30 minutes if your servers crash? These are just a few of the benefits of hosting.
Your IT department, or your outsourced IT department should have IT projects going on at all times. When your technology gets stagnate is when it becomes hard to recover. It’s hard because too much has to be done at one time. It is best to keep your technology flowing, and your practice flowing with an infrastructure that is conducive to less downtime and more efficiency. Having no plan and no projects are a bad thing!
Sheryl Cherico, CEO
