Saluting Our Hospitals

May 10 – May 16 is National Hospital Week, and for me and probably for you, this is deeply personal this year.

As the former vice president of IT for Dignity Health Systems and former CIO at Phoenix Children’s Hospital, I know first-hand how extremely difficult it is to operate a provider organization. In addition to the all-important mission of improving patient outcomes, you’re saddled with small margins, huge overhead expenses, legacy software, constant threat of cyberattack, and daily challenges with recruiting and retaining talent.

Then you factor in COVID-19.

The novel coronavirus has taken what was already an arduous task and made it infinitely harder. Yet, these hospitals and the incredible teams they employ rose to the challenge in ways we could not imagine just a few months ago.

Parking garages were made into make-shift emergency rooms. Doctors and nurses worked relentless shifts and showed a courage and commitment that can and should inspire us all for generations to come. IT teams, supply chain, and other support teams also leaned in and work without rest behind the scenes.

Hospitals postponed elective surgeries – the key margin they make to support other operations – so all resources could be focused on saving lives stricken by the Coronavirus.

When this is over, and we all pray and hope that day is soon approaching, the hard work won’t be over for hospital teams who will have much to bolster. The restoration process is going to involve some tough financial decisions.

I am thankful to work in an industry of such incredible service and heroism and I want to thank all of the staff at our nation’s hospitals this week, and every week.

In my role, I get to work directly with hospital leaders and I want to let you know there are things ClearDATA can do to help both now and as we transition to the next phase of dealing with the fallout from this pandemic, and in helping you as you inevitably now have to plan and prepare for similar events.

First, I am getting a lot of questions from provider IT leaders about rapid deployment of analytics environments. We can help. We’ve recently done that for several customers supporting urgent requests for expanding workloads on the cloud, or migrating to cloud for rapid scaling. We also can provide healthcare-exclusive cloud expertise and consulting on big data, financial, operational, and clinical dashboards, or population health initiatives.

All of you are asking about ways to address spend. We know COVID has hit your margins hard. There are ways to optimize costs on the cloud. From cloud-native Platform as a Service solutions to other methods; from how you buy cloud to how you deploy, i.e., via Kubernetes for minimizing resources and scaling up and then back down–there are ways to contain costs.

We can share how you can hang on to your capital without tying it up by moving to an OpEx model a little at a time. For many of you, incremental change to start your cloud journey may be the best business model.

But most importantly, we can help reduce your risk at a time where external and internal pressures have forced vulnerability into your environment. Cybercrime and hacking have significantly increased in the time since COVID’s arrival. The hackers have not been furloughed. We can help identify your security gaps and create an environment that protects you and your patients through improved security, compliance visualizations, and Automated Safeguards that mitigate risk and keep you in compliance as you rebuild from this crisis and prepare for the future.

Bottom line, you’ve been there for all of us during this. We want to support and guide you through this to a more scalable and sustainable future. We can help.

Thank you for all you do. Your heroism and selflessness is truly inspirational. We celebrate you this week, and every week.

To learn more about how we are helping our customers across Provider, Payer, Pharma, Life Sciences and Healthcare IT address COVID-19 challenges, visit our COVID-19 Resources Center.