Q: What are some of the challenges facing ASCs that manage their own servers to run facility management and EHR software?
Scott Palmer: What’s happening is the time and labor needed to maintain servers is becoming more and more intense, and ASCs often lack the internal IT resources to handle maintenance. It costs them money to bring in a Microsoft-certified IT specialist every time a server needs to be serviced. Most servers will cost an ASC around $500 per month to maintain, and that’s on top of the $6,000 it costs to replace the server every three years, as is recommended.
Risk management can also be a big challenge for ASCs with their own servers. Servers must be monitored and backed up continually. Even the largest ASCs are unable to secure and manage their servers at a level comparable to a professionally managed data center. Those facilities offer continual monitoring of servers’ health and readiness, have automatic failover and hardware redundancy, provide the frequent operating system patches necessary to stay current and multiple levels of data backup performed by the data center staff.
Q: If an ASC outsources its servers, what does that model look like?
SP: In most cases, the facility would provide local workstations, which can include tablet devices and low-cost thin client workstations, printers, scanners and access to the Internet, and a host would provide the servers, which are securely accessed through the Web, as well as maintenance, for a monthly fee. A hosting option requires no upfront investment, which is an additional benefit to ASCs. SourceMedical determines the monthly price based on the number of devices an ASC has connected to the server. Another benefit of the hosted application for SourceMedical software clients is that software updates are automatic. With on-site servers, an ASC would manually have to update the software.
Q: Are hosted applications a popular alternative or it is more of an emerging trend?
SP: In the practice management space, Internet-based applications are becoming more popular, but only about 17 percent of ASCs have implemented EHRs and almost none of them are Web-based. A great benefit of Web-based applications is that they can be accessed from anywhere, anytime. Most facilities with in-house serves don’t have this capability.
Q: Are hosted applications secure?
SP: Users of hosted applications actually go through an extra level of security. They must log into the Virtual Private Network to access the server and then have to log on to the specific software application they use. The data transmission and server data is also encrypted at the highest level of encryption available, which a lot of facilities with in-house servers fail to do.
Learn more about SourceMedical and its Hosted Vision and Vision EHR applications.
