Amid a pandemic, it is more important than ever to remain forward-thinking in your IT strategy and maximize the impact of the organization’s IT budgets. As we all now understand, the nature of the current situation has significant short-term budget impacts and will fundamentally change the financial framework of the ongoing patient care model. While the very survival of many organizations are at stake, IT leadership must look at this as an opportunity to enhance the agility of your current organization and positioning it to pivot and lead the change to the patient care model framework.

This article applies the core strategies that as managing partners of T2 Tech Group, both Kevin Torf and I have utilized to build a strong track record for maximizing results with constrained IT budgets.

Here are our top 3 strategies to maximize the impact of your organization’s IT spend:

1. Work with executive leadership to align IT with strategic growth and operational efficiency opportunities

Work with your executive IT steering committee to focus on identifying and investing in impactful priorities.

  • Growth opportunities such as new service lines
  • Organizational efficiency initiatives such as patient throughput, staff/equipment scheduling and supply line management processes
  • Revenue cycle initiatives

A critical success factor is to defer low priority projects to maintain focus and accelerate timelines of high impact priorities. Simple to say but difficult to achieve.

2. Understand that IT vendors and service providers are in the same situation and are ready to deal

There has not been a better time to reduce your operational spending and solidify your IT service provider partnerships or develop new ones. Revisit your existing IT cost framework and work with the vendor marketplace to creatively reduce your short- and long-term cost profile.

  • Revisit your high-cost IT service provider agreements especially those long-standing agreements to ensure that pricing packages reflect the current marketplace
  • No interest financing packages for your capital project investments with extended amortization schedules
  • Revisit your IT architecture and services framework to consolidate and/or eliminate components and evaluate utilization and unused capacity
  • Quickly gain an understanding of the current marketplace for on-premises/off-premises options and IT service packages/cost models

This is difficult for some organizations because of long term IT service provider relationships and it requires time to identify and execute high impact opportunities. We have found that this is well worth the effort if one has the proper perspective, understands the current marketplace, and utilizes a methodology that accelerates the above process.

3. Prepare your organization to make the pivot and ensure long term viability

There has not been a better time to reduce your operational spending and solidify your IT service provider partnerships or develop new ones. Again, revisit your existing IT cost framework and work with the vendor marketplace to creatively reduce your short- and long-term cost profile.

  • Understand the short term and long-term pivot capabilities such as telemedicine, remote staff collaboration tools, and work from home capabilities
  • Understand your readiness to enable these pivot capabilities and the cost to close short and long-term gaps
  • Using the first two strategies, align these IT initiatives with your organization’s priorities to enable – in a timely manner – these pivot capabilities

These pivot technologies will most likely need to be implemented in a phased approach to enable immediate term capabilities and provide you time to implement underlying IT infrastructure improvements to evolve and implement the longer-term pivot strategy and capabilities.

We will continue this blog series identifying methodologies and case studies of how successful IT leadership are productively collaborating with their executive team to position their organization to weather the immediate term crisis and pivot to support the new healthcare provisioning models.

If you’d like to learn more about how T2 Tech Group can help your organization with these or other IT challenges, check out some of our case studies or reach out to us and schedule a complimentary consultation.