How Does your Practice Measure Up: a Self-Assessment

How can you tell if you’re using technology to help meet business goals? Our favorite strategy is to begin by benchmarking. Understand how the policies, procedures, and leadership decisions all affect a practice’s ability to optimize technology.

Here at Systeem, we use an assessment to help our clients understand how technology contributes to business goals. We look through 20 different data points and categories to understand how our clients use technology, and how we can help them optimize their technology.

From that assessment, we’ve pulled three of the most important topics you should be considering at your practice. Feel free to do a quick self-assessment using the questions below.

IT Security and Compliance

Let’s get real, as a medical practice, security is one of your top concerns. This includes maximizing your ability to keep data secure and comply with HIPAA policies. Ask yourself, how would you describe IT security at your practice?

1. There aren’t any security policies, and no security efforts are being measured

2. We talk about security, but still no formal policies in place, no one is overseeing compliance

3. Our practice knows security is necessary, but we don’t have a formal plan in place to comply

4. We’ve identified and documented security policies, but we don’t always enforce them in practice

5. Our practice has identified security policies, documented them, and they are enforced each day

Staff Training

The best step toward optimizing your technology is giving your staff the tools to navigate it well. Training allows staff to feel comfortable with the tools they use each day and increases efficiency through the clinical process. Which statement best describes your training process?

1. Our practice doesn’t have formal technology training, staff learn informally

2. We do some technology training, but most learning is informal

3. There is a formal training process with some documentation

4. Formal training occurs during onboarding and continues throughout the year

5. We have formal training during onboarding that continues throughout the year, we measure staff skills and tailor training to their needs

Budgeting for IT

Just like we mentioned in our last blog, it’s important to stay on top of your technology requirements. Creating a technology plan and budget can help your practice anticipate when big purchases are around the corner and understand the potential costs. How would you rank your IT plan and budget strategy?

1. We don’t have a formal IT budget, we purchase technology ad-hoc

2. IT expenses are paid for during pain points, most purchases are not planned

3. We created an IT roadmap, we buy some technology in advance, some as needed

4. We have documented our technology roadmap, created a budget, and buy technology in advance

5. Our practice has a documented IT budget based on our roadmap, we review the budget quarterly, and buy all technology in advance

Are you satisfied with your results? It’s okay if you aren’t, but you should be. You’ve taken a step in the right direction. Use your responses today as a benchmark to better understand how technology contributes to your overall business goals. Even better, discuss these topics with your leadership team to understand how you can get to the next level.

Each of our clients come to us at different places in their technology journey. Using our full assessment, we can understand their starting point and how to help them get to the next level. In our next post we’ll go over strategies to help align your technology and business goals.

Becca Wood, Client Success Specialist

Becca comes to Systeem after earning her M.A. and M.B.A from Southern Methodist University. She has a passion for writing and sharing ways practices can find peace with technology.