Deep Freeze Cloud: Streamlining IT Operations in Healthcare Settings

When dealing with something as important as healthcare, it’s crucial that IT operations make processes easier and more efficient. Unfortunately, many healthcare institutions, agencies and companies struggle with inefficient IT that hinders how they function as much as it helps. This highlights the need for a streamlined IT setup.

Faronics developed Deep Freeze Cloud with healthcare clients in mind. While Deep Freeze is effective in numerous settings and industries, the utility of our solution in healthcare is especially striking. Learn how Deep Freeze Cloud can help healthcare organizations get the most from their IT and operate more effectively.

Healthcare IT

In an industry that routinely tasks its workforce with literally saving people’s lives, IT really shouldn’t be one of the biggest problems. And yet, this is often the case. IT is meant to help facilitate delivering healthcare. But healthcare organizations must manage their IT effectively for it to truly help them deliver the care their patients need.

It is the very importance of healthcare that sometimes gets in the way of managing IT successfully. When your primary task — making people healthier — is so critical and frequently complex, you can be forgiven for not focussing on upgrading your IT. Ideally, this is the responsibility of administrators, but they face numerous challenges themselves.

Here are some common reasons IT is often less than ideal in healthcare settings:

IT Accumulates Over Time

This is a problem many organizations face, irrespective of their industry. As an organization adds more software, solutions and platforms, the entire system becomes bogged down and unwieldy. Maybe one app isn’t compatible with another or one old platform slows things down. Having one solution that can streamline IT operations can be incredibly helpful for hospitals and medical organizations.

Limited Budgets

Whether it’s a hospital, a health network or government agency, healthcare organizations often have limiting budgets. Even for-profit healthcare companies frequently can’t spend as much as they’d like on their IT department. This means finding new solutions to streamline IT management is rarely a priority, even though streamlining would likely be a great benefit.

Mountain of Data

Not only do healthcare organizations store and rely on huge amounts of data, that data is often highly sensitive. When dealing with people’s health information, data security must be an utmost concern. Finding data management systems and architecture that secure this information while making it readily available to the professionals who need to access it is tricky. 

Compliance

Healthcare is a heavily regulated industry and complying with regulations is non-negotiable. Such regulations include HIPAA in the U.S. and GDPR in the EU. Non-compliance can lead to fines, lawsuits and reputational damage.

Healthcare and Cybersecurity

Separate from all the above IT issues is security. Nothing renders IT ineffective more than a devastating cyberattack. Unfortunately, hackers and cybercriminals are only too willing to attack hospitals, clinics, health organizations and government health agencies. Some healthcare cybersecurity issues to be aware of include:

• Lack of encryption: Encrypting data isn’t always easy, and healthcare companies sometimes don’t stay on top of it. This can be a major problem because insufficient encryption of data in transit or at rest exposes medical information to potential theft. 

• Ransomware attacks: If healthcare IT teams don’t encrypt their data, threat actors might. With ransomware, cybercriminals can encrypt data or critical systems, making them unusable for the victim. They then demand a ransom, undoing the damage only upon receipt of what is likely an exorbitant payment.

• Multiple device vulnerabilities: Many healthcare organizations offer bring your own device, hybrid work or remote work policies. There are many benefits to all these setups, but with staff using various devices, maybe on public Wi-Fi networks, the potential entry points for threat actors increases significantly. 

• Third-party vendor vulnerabilities: Vendors supplying IT services or devices to healthcare providers often have vulnerabilities in their own systems. This can result in indirect breaches, which may be just as damaging.

How Deep Freeze Cloud Can Help

Deep Freeze offers Reboot-to-Restore technology, meaning you can revert a workstation to a previously set state, undoing any unauthorized changes. This can ensure privacy by erasing session data with a single reboot. Deep Freeze also boosts the performance of computers handling medical records, prescriptions, medical billing and insurance data.

Deep Freeze also helps healthcare teams manage a range of different devices. For example, you can monitor and examine systems, fixing issues in systems for endoscopy, patient management and more. This saves valuable time for doctors, nurses and patients. And healthcare providers can ensure 100% uptime for scanning and imaging systems, such as ultrasound, CT Scan, X-Ray and others.To learn more about how Deep Freeze Cloud can help in healthcare settings, please reach out to our experts today.