My blog today is about IT service and consulting. Mostly, I like to write about our medical IT services, but it occurred to me that I never talk about our consulting. As a professional medical IT support company, consulting is not an added bonus, it is a MUST, and is part of what we do.
What Do We Consult On?
Easy question…long answer. When I started this business in 2005, I never felt like I wanted to just fix computers. With practices moving to electronic medical records, I felt that they needed a full “IT Department” but understood that it could be expensive for small practices, and they did not need someone 40 hours per week. At that time, I had viewed more than 20 electronic medical records, and I felt we had a lot to offer practices not only in Georgia, but throughout the country. I started to be able to identify which ones were good for which specialties. I could find practices that were willing to share their EMR stories, and in some cases, their templates. We became very valuable in the medical space because of our knowledge of how a cardiology group runs, or an OB-GYN clinic, or a pediatric office. We became the “go to” people and worked tirelessly to help practices get up and running with their new EMR.
Fast forward to 2009 and HIPAA security assessments, rules and regulations started to consume the space. We made sure we knew as much about HIPAA as we could. We took classes, passed exams, and read thousands and thousands of pages, as well as books. We became the “go to people” for HIPAA.
Enter the cloud. Practices did not know what to do about the cloud. Most did not even understand it. We became extremely valuable to our client for helping them save money by transitioning to the cloud, and helping them save thousands of dollars while gaining many more benefits for backups, disaster recovery, remote connectivity, and speed. We sat down with our clients and explained to them where the industry was headed, and what they needed to do to save money. Remember when people were saying “I can’t have my data in the cloud. I don’t know where that is!”
Because of the cloud, HIPAA and EMR, we decided to stay in the medical field only. We have never branched out. We thought about it many times, but did not want to dilute our knowledge base. The medical industry was our passion, and we wanted to focus solely, 100% on providing IT and consulting services. Here we are in 2016, and we are one of the largest medical IT providers in the country. There is MUCH more to fixing computers. We get that.
