Is it Time to Ditch Your Legacy Technology?
Historically, community, critical access, and rural hospitals didn’t have many options when it came to their enterprise systems. Tight margins and limited technical support have held smaller hospitals back from being able to invest in enterprise-scale ERP systems. Often, disconnected systems and paper-based processes were often put in place for materials management, financials, human resources, etc.
Many smaller hospitals are still working with these tools today, but the technology is no longer helping advance the business goals or supporting the mission of safer patient care. Instead, it is frustrating the people who use the system every day and preventing them from getting visibility into the business and information needed to get their job done. Legacy technology leads to pervasive and persistent user frustration, low productivity, increased operating costs, and more.
One key issue is that older solutions weren’t designed with future scalability in mind. They were put in place to solve a specific problem without much thought to how the business will change. Cloud-based, industry-specialized ERP now exists, eliminating the previous barriers, bringing enterprise-caliber ERP to community, rural, and critical access hospitals.
Decrease Costs
Sure, replacing or upgrading an ERP is an expensive proposition to consider. While delaying an ERP upgrade may seem like a money-saver, in the long run, modifications, patches, and work arounds for subpar workflows make legacy systems a money pit. Cloud-based ERP offers the potential for making new applications less expensive than traditional applications, allowing community and rural hospitals to leverage modern technology and automate essential business functions while being fully integrated across all departments for smoother, more cost-efficient processes.
Outdated hardware and software invite risk for data loss, cyberattacks, and limited tech support from software providers — all costs that could be mitigated with a technology upgrade. When considering the value of modernization, the cost of maintaining legacy technology far outweighs the upfront cost of updating software.
Efficiency is Key
What C-suite leaders don’t want to hear is that their staff can’t be productive because technology is holding them back. With a single source of truth for financial, human resources, and supply chain data, and clear insights into each business aspect of the organization on improved, personalized dashboards, hospital staff can focus on the critical work of patient care rather than putting all their time and effort into endless application management. Increased efficiency, improved productivity, and tighter collaboration are some of the key wins gained through modernizing.
Decrease Errors with Ease
It used to be that departments needed to maintain their own information, manually or otherwise, with data that needed to be imported and exported or constantly re-entered to keep current. This came at the cost of high rate of errors, lower productivity, and significant time loss. Cloud-based ERP systems, created specifically with community hospitals in mind, offer real-time, accurate data across the business, allowing organizations to streamline operations and continue to deliver high quality patient care.
With real-time insights, community and rural access hospitals can make crucial decisions quickly and without waste. Teams can rapidly detect any obstacles that might lower productivity levels, and a clear overall picture of the whole health system makes effective decision-making much easier.
For readers who realized their hospital’s infrastructure is in need of major modernization, get in touch to learn how Avaap is already helping healthcare organizations upgrade their systems and bring attention back to the patient.