The Buyer's Guide to MEDITECH Hosting

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eBook excerpt

Benefits of Hosting

Outsourcing any aspect of an operational-critical application can be daunting, but many organizations have found that the benefits outweigh the risks. So why is Hosting becoming so popular?

1. Alleviates burden on IT staff. By outsourcing ongoing server maintenance, performance and availability of MEDITECH systems, you give internal IT staff more capacity to prioritize their efforts on localized IT projects that focus on improving patient experience.
2. Offers scalability. Hosting provides the ability to use IT resources in a way that best fits your organization’s performance needs like scaling storage, bandwidth, and more. Hosting providers can efficiently spin up and fine-tune application environments to meet changing application demands, as well as programmatically perform monitoring, testing, and updates.
3. Delivers cost efficiencies. With a properly provisioned application environment, a hosting model allows for a more predictable billing cycle and eliminates unplanned capital expenditures such as server replacements. In addition, there are often cost benefits based on the buying power of your hosting partner, and their investments in training, compliance filings and other ancillary items that add up to larger benefits for the customer.
4. Provides stronger security and application performance. Hosting provides dedicated security infrastructure and change management processes that address data, network, application and physical security. This includes secure and encrypted solutions for the following: Firewalls, Identity Management, Data Isolation, Storage Segregation, and ITL and Change Management Protocols.
5. More reliable backup and disaster recovery. Hybrid cloud systems enable a faster and more convenient approach to disaster recovery. This includes data backup, testing and verification of the backup, and/or plans to restore access and data in the event of a disaster.
6. Ongoing support. Hosting provides ongoing technical support for your MEDITECH systems and, depending on your hosting provider, can also include integrated EMR support for a ‘one provider’ support model.

Potential hidden costs

When implementing any new system, it can be easy to get caught off guard by hidden fees. Below are five costs to account for when creating your MEDITECH infrastructure budget.

1.  Physical and environmental cost. As discussed earlier, on-premise data centers need to be housed in large spaces with room to grow and with the proper environment to protect servers. In addition to the cost of constructing the infrastructure, ongoing operational expenses associated with the environment (for example heating and cooling) could increase, too.
2.  Software licensing. To securely run servers your organization needs specific software like: Antivirus protection •  Hypervisor •  Backup software •  Application software •  Any bolt-on or third-party software
3. Data and medical records retention. Transferring from one platform to another oftentimes includes fees associated with accessing and moving your data. When establishing your organization’s data retention plan to meet regulatory requirements and comprehensive clinical records, be sure to communicate your data retention requirements, options and pricing with partners. CereCore has helped clients save costs by extracting data from an organization’s legacy system and providing practical options for providing viewable access in the Legacy Archive Viewer (LAV) solution.
4. Technical staff. On-premise data centers require constant maintenance which can stretch IT staff. With the rise of labor rates and staffing retention issues, your organization could face budgeting challenges if you need to replace and train IT staff.
5. Backup as a Service (BaaS). When self-hosting you will need a backup of your organization’s data and systems. BaaS is one way to do that. Make sure that your BaaS vendor routinely checks and tests backups to ensure the data is accurate and can be restored without issue.

Download the full eBook for other budget and cost-comparison considerations, a buyer's checklist, and tips for migration.