The healthcare industry is currently going through a state of massive transformation. Thanks to the integration of information technology into everyday life, health care has seen tremendous advances in terms of patient care and the facility experience. This has also resulted in hospital consolidation, where hospitals are choosing to combine their services under one roof to improve efficiencies.
What it all means today is that medical environments are going digital at a fast pace. While this has made things much more convenient for both patients and doctors, it also means that there is a bigger risk of cyber-attacks on the network itself.
With clinics and hospitals migrating to an environment where all patient information can be stored in a single platform, there is one takeaway – the possibility of a huge data breach is real. As cyber security has become one of the biggest concerns in today’s time, we will see more and more health care organizations shifting to Hosted VoIP phone systems in order to ensure their networks and patient information remain secure at all times.
With the above changes in the healthcare landscape, let’s take a look at some of the major changes that are taking place, and how Hosted VoIP can help keep patient data more secure than before.
Virtualization
When virtualization was first introduced to Hospital Information Systems (HIS), it allowed for the creation of dedicated servers to store all patient information centrally. This had multiple benefits – the first was that the centralization of information meant faster access to patient data by doctors and nurses; secondly, it allowed for greater security over networks because the storage systems were all under one roof.
As hospitals started migrating to virtualized environments however, they soon realized that there were two main drawbacks associated with the process – one was that updates on the systems would take longer because of the need to wait for one application after another to be placed on a single server, and secondly, there was increased risk of an outage if any one system went down.
This meant that the centralization of information wasn’t working out as expected, at least in terms of patient data security. As a result, we saw more and more hospitals choosing to migrate to a virtual environment with dedicated servers in place. However, with the increased number of systems involved in this process, there was also an increase in cost and time needed for updates.
Until very recently, Hosted VoIP phone systems were not in wide use by healthcare organizations because of these reasons. However, this has changed with the introduction of Virtualized Hosting services. When an organization chooses to go down the virtualization path, there are companies that offer virtualization packages where all servers can be housed together in one location. This means that updates on individual servers will not affect the other systems, and also reduces downtime significantly as a single outage doesn’t affect the network.
The other advantage is that the virtualization environment allows for a better sense of security when compared to a hybrid or dedicated system. With a single server housing patient information data from multiple clinics, hospitals and medical centers, it means that there can be no leakage of information because all have equal access to this central data.
Hosted VoIP in healthcare
With all this information, it is easy to see that the primary use of Hosted VoIP in today’s time is to provide hospitals and clinics with a way of keeping patient data safe and secure. With multiple healthcare providers migrating to virtualized hosting services, there has been a spike in demand for Hosted VoIP phone systems in the industry.
Many hospitals have already moved to virtualized hosting services, while others are slowly making their way towards this path. With just under half of all healthcare providers having adopted virtualization for their networks, there is no doubt that Hosted VoIP phone systems will soon be considered a strong mode of communication within the industry.
With Hosted VoIP phone systems in place, we can see healthcare ministries, community organizations, hospitals and other medical facilities implementing advanced communication and data services for faster access to patient information. With VoIP services, the healthcare industry can guarantee a reliable, secure and flexible IT environment that supports clinical applications.
If you want to find out more about how you can use Hosted VoIP to improve your workflow reach out to menetalk – UK’s leading business VoIP providers. We will be glad to assist you with any information that you might need.
