40% of Hospitals Self-Declared as Struggling Financially Due to IT Problems
“94% of the surveyed hospital CFOs self-identified as “struggling”, report that delayed or failed implementations in other IT systems, particularly EHR, have drastically impacted the organization’s financial position.”
That is what is says in the third sentence of a fascinating press release I just read from healthcare market research firm Black Book Market Research. The press release goes on to cite a number of other statistics from their research including stats that many healthcare CFOs are expecting to lose their jobs by 2016 and that there will be a trend to start hiring CEOs from outside healthcare.
I have witnessed some of the reasons for the IT troubles at healthcare companies:
· Healthcare companies on the whole have been laggards in adoption of fresh information technologies.
· IT personnel at most healthcare organizations themselves are behind the curve on...
Smoke testing is a term used to describe the testing process for servers after patches are applied. 
Estimating an average time for patching servers and PCs can be a bit tricky. It can vary from one month to the next, depending upon the number and complexity of the patches released by your software vendors. You must consider all versions of operating systems and have a complete inventory of all your application software to do this job correctly. Our experience has shown that manual patching of systems takes on average of about 1.5 hours each.
This is a basic cost calculator for you to compute your typical monthly cost for patching your servers, PCs, laptops, tablets and associated application software. It also forms the basis for you to begin calculating your Return on Investment for software patching, or for comparison with alternatives to the manual process of patching operating systems and application software—such as Patch Management as a Service, also known as Vulnerability Management as a Service.