Webinar Replay: What Is Operational Friction Actually Costing Your Practice?

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Mike Fuhrman (MF): Hello everyone, thank you for joining us today. Appreciate your time. I’m Mike Fuhrman, CEO of Omega Systems. Omega Systems is a managed services, IT managed services and managed security services provider headquartered in Eastern Pennsylvania. Really focused on two main industry verticals, financial services and healthcare. We were delighted late last year in the late October timeframe to welcome PEAKE Technology Partners, a managed services provider based in Maryland and entirely focused on the healthcare vertical to join forces with Omega.

I’m delighted today to have Chris Knotts with me. Chris Knotts is the founder and CEO of PEAKE Technology Partners. And today’s topic primarily is to talk about operational friction, specifically operational friction in a healthcare practice and how that looks, how that feels when it’s tied to IT in particular, and most importantly, talk about some practical things that we and you can all do to reduce that friction. Then  we’ll have some Q&A if time allows at the end, which should be great.

Chris, maybe I’ll just kind of kick things off. I hear you talk a lot about walking into a practice and feeling it, seeing it firsthand what operational friction looks like. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that experience you’ve had so many times in the past when you enter into a practice.

Chris Knotts (CK): Yeah. I mean, sometimes it’s been in my role as a healthcare IT company leader and at other times it’s just been as a patient. And, you know, that’s happened more than once.

Usually we’re working with practices. Obviously, they have electronic medical records system. They’ve got other medical devices. They’re using a call center or some type of phone system. They probably have guest wireless so that people can get on to the network if they’re sitting in the waiting room.

The friction that I’ve observed usually is evident right at the front desk. If the staff is feeling like they can’t work in their systems or they can’t get the tools that they’re working with to work at the speed of their click, which is usually pretty fast.

You see it, you feel it, and it happens really before you even talk to one of the physician owners or if you’re on the patient side, you’re seen by the clinical staff. So, technology is in everything that our practice customers are doing today. If any piece of that system really doesn’t operate at the speed that they need to operate, then it slows them down.

And that creates frustration, that creates inefficiencies in the practice. Usually it’s evident right at the front desk if systems aren’t working at the speed that they want it to. My kind of joke when I walk in either as a patient or if I’m there in another capacity, if someone’s saying, “My system’s not working fast enough or the system’s not booting,” I’m like, “You’ve got to be nice to your computer,” which always gets a little chuckle.

But that’s how they feel sometimes. Like, what do I have to do to my systems today to get them to work at the speed that I need to operate? So you just feel it that way. You try to make light of it, but it impacts them.

MF: Yep. I’ve seen it as well as a patient. You walk in, you’ll see them referencing a scribble pad of sorts, where they’ve jotted down notes, shortcuts, maybe even passwords on stickies, things that they’re trying to do, little life hacks, if you will, that they’re trying to do to work around some of the friction and obstacles that they have in there.

So, what happens? If I’m working, let’s just keep the front desk analogy going. Let’s say I’m at the front desk. At some point, what do I do when I’m stuck with these little things that are kind of gnawing at my daily functions and my productivity? What does that look like over time when you have this day in and day out?

CK: The  first thing is something you mentioned earlier, which are workarounds. People find ways to work around the system, and then those practices sometimes become embedded in just how people get things done.

There may be a way to actually perform a function within their EMR, like insurance verification. But if that doesn’t work at the speed that they’re looking for, then maybe they don’t do that. They skip that step, which could cause a problem downstream when it comes to billing.

So I think workarounds are one. Complaints, they raise their hand until they’re tired of doing it to the practice administrator. Then that kind of at a low level becomes part of their frustration in their job that they do and that impacts customer service. Maybe they actually have to take extra steps to get something done because technology isn’t working properly. Or in some cases, I’ve seen it where they just can’t work. They’ve got to go to paper.

I’ve been in situations where there’s a server outage or their EMR is down and it completely impacts their environment. I think the systemic things lead to workarounds, they lead to built-in inefficiencies. They generally also lead, again, at that staff level to frustration with their jobs.

And that leads through, that can affect patient care, can affect the patient experience.

MF: Absolutely, makes perfect sense and I would guess at some point, not when you have complete work stoppage, but that when it’s just a series of little things popping up every day, you sort of just end up accepting it for what it is. Do you see that happening, are practice owners sort of just like, “You know what, it’s not everything I want, but it’s sort of the way it is and not worth my time?”

CK: Yeah, I do see that.

I think that comes up in a couple of ways. If you kind of now we’re moving into just the day-to-day IT support. Again, technology is in everything that the practice is involved in. Every system is on some type of computer-based system of some sort.

There’s an acceptance of status quo. You know, if it’s not completely broken, we’re not going to address it. If they don’t have a full outage, then they’re not going to take the steps to maybe migrate that server out of that closet that’s at the end of the hallway and into the cloud.

So it’s a little bit of an acceptance of mediocre. In some cases, there’s different opinions within practice leadership of, “Let’s not change things,” or “I’ve got to wait until a particular doctor leaves before we can usher change.” That impacts things too.

The day-to-day operational efficiency is kind of the low-level stress that’s created. But what ultimately can happen in situations where IT isn’t performing properly is that there can be some type of outage or security event that really does impact things. And then there’s usually a willingness to make a change.

But if it’s just the everyday low level, it typically doesn’t drive change. It just impacts the practice in ways that are really tough for them to quantify on their own.

MF: Makes sense. I know you’ve told me a number of times before there’s a relatively straightforward way to walk into a practice, sit down with an owner, and understand in their own words what that environment looks like. When you walk in and you ask them to tell you about their IT environment, what are some of the telltale signs, things you hear from them that tell you that there’s a series of these annoyances underneath the surface?

CK: Yeah. Well, that’s evolving a bit because now more practice owners are starting to think about AI and we’ll touch on that.

There’s an acceptance of status quo and of less than ideal. There’s usually change transitioning IT providers, at least in the practice mind, is a daunting task. We usually really work hard to make that very smooth. So, the fear of change in some cases can cause a “good enough” solution to feel as good as ideal.

Which is unfortunate because in some cases, technology can be used in ways that really do improve the practice.

There’s also a real lack of understanding of the potential vulnerabilities that could exist again in their security.

But I do also see some of this changing with the many AI tools that are out there. A lot of times recently we’re hearing, “How do I use this tool or that tool?” or “What should we be doing? What should we allow our staff to do?”

So that conversation’s changing a bit. I think a lot of it was focused on security and compliance, which still needs to be a major focus, especially with the HIPAA changes that are likely coming this year.

But as this AI topic also comes into the mix, there’s a lot of questions. I think that brought technology back to the surface because there are these new and fundamentally model-shifting tools available to practices now. It’s creating a lot of new questions.

MF: Yeah. And do you find that when there’s operational friction in the practice that it either tamps down the interest and desire to do a lot of these things you’ve just been talking about? Like is it getting in the way of being able to advance the business forward using these new technologies, ensuring effective compliance, etc.?

CK: Yeah, in many ways, especially if the practice is focused on growth.

I see this regularly where they want to grow. It’s challenging to be in the private practice business and reimbursements are pinched and margins are pinched. One of the ways to navigate that is to grow, maybe introduce new services, new capabilities.

We see practices that didn’t have surgery centers before opening surgery centers or adding new services.

And if IT is a drag in the business, then it’s going to limit the ability to do things like that, to add new services. I think one of the compliments that I’ve heard more recently was a practice owner grew his practice 20-plus locations and then he exited the business.

But in that process, one of the statements he made was having smooth-running technology   using technology as a tool for the business helped them accelerate their growth. And it was never a barrier for them growing.

So it does impact it. It’s a drag on the organization. There might be questions about, “How do we actually do this?” or “Can we implement this?” “What challenges will we have with technology if we decide to go down this path of expanding the business?”

You don’t want that to be the case. Technology shouldn’t be a limiter. It should be an accelerator for a practice if they’re choosing to expand their business or change the business in any way.

MF: Right. Makes a lot of sense.

And I was curious, because you spend so much time talking to practice owners, if you had to pinpoint one, maybe two things that are the most common items that a practice owner underestimates with respect to day-to-day operational drag associated with their IT environment, what would those be?

CK: Yeah.

Well, one is definitely the cybersecurity risk. That is regularly underestimated. At this point, many practices, if they haven’t been through a cyber event of some sort, they know somebody who has.

But I still talk to practice leaders and physician owners that make the assumption that because they haven’t had an incident, they are therefore secure.

And it’s just the wrong assumption to make. There are so many ways that cyber threats are evolving that the practice and the IT team supporting the practice needs to evolve as well.

So that’s significantly underestimated in some situations, the threat of a cyber incident, because having an OCR event or having to take the practice offline for a few days and those letters that go out to patients, those are very reputationally harming.

The other thing is just the way that IT and the technology they choose and the EMR they choose can enhance the practice. I think that’s underestimated.

It’s very difficult to change electronic medical record systems, but we’re seeing the change of EMRs and practice management systems really at a pace that I’ve never observed.

Of course, there was the original wave of everyone moving to EMRs. And then there’s been a slow transition as some have become more feature-full and others have reduced in features or even gone out of business or been acquired.

But we’re seeing that more now where practices have enough experience to know, “We know what we need. We see systems in our specialty that are very effective.”

But that’s an area that can be underestimated, which is how staying on a current platform is potentially holding back the practice. We see many practices thinking about what that next step might be and considering a change.

MF: Then there’s the, on the surface, looks like small issues where it takes an employee three, four extra minutes to do a job than it has to because of drag around IT. I think we often kind of accept that as normal but then you think about a practice that might have 20 or 30 employees and you multiply those four minutes across five or 30 people on a daily basis. And all of a sudden you’re adding up to what could be at a minimum a part-time salary that you ended up paying to cover the cost, if you will, of that. You see that happening in practices?

CK: Yeah, I do.

And the statement, “This is the way we’ve always done it,” I hear regularly. If you hear that, dig in a little bit deeper. Ask the why, why, why, the five whys, to really get to an answer. That’s a huge issue.

We all get into habits of how we use our systems and our tools around us. I know that I do it. Taking at least annually a set-aside time to step through the processes within the organization is a very healthy thing to do because it uncovers those three or four minutes that people are doing things that add up.

And just asking some questions about, “Show me how you go from A to B with this task that you’re trying to perform.” If it’s a billing task or a front desk task, that can usually be done with somebody in the practice that’s focused on process or compliance or continuous improvement.

In some cases, you can use an outside vendor or consultant to help think through practices. In many cases, the EMR vendors will have continuing education because their features change. In last year’s version, maybe you still can do it that way, but there could be a new feature that simplifies that task.

I usually recommend someone within the practice being the process person. Sometimes that’s the practice administrator, sometimes that’s someone else. As organizations scale, there can be someone whose job is full time to always be thinking about the processes and the steps people take.

Obviously, technology comes into play, but a lot of times it’s the software that they’re using and how they’re using it and how they could potentially use it more efficiently.

One of the things that I’ve seen done is a patient journey map. Thinking about it from the patient’s experience, from the moment they search for you as a service provider, and that’s changing with AI.

At one point in the last year, the number of searches happening within Google dipped below the searches happening within ChatGPT or AI tools. And the way those work, many people don’t really understand, but it’s very different than how search engine optimization works.

So, from the moment that a patient searches for you all the way through billing and continual relationship, taking a look at that patient journey and mapping that out and thinking about what that patient experiences is important.

Customer service surveys and those responses matter. They can impact reimbursement as a factor.

Thinking about it from the patient’s experience, thinking about it from an employee’s experience too, and having someone in your practice that at least annually puts some dedicated time into really looking at processes and trying to make improvements.

MF: I think the employee aspect is often overlooked because if the patient journey isn’t great, that often ends up being felt by the staff. Nobody’s getting up to come to work every day and doing a poor job taking care of outcomes for their patients. They care about that stuff, and they feel bad when that outcome isn’t the best it can be.

And ultimately, I would guess that can lead to burnout on staff. Coming in every day and feeling like you’re not doing everything the best, the fastest, for the best patient outcome starts to wear an employee down over time.

Then you have the whole additional cost with respect to employee morale and retention and replacement of people, and it just becomes a bit of a spiraling mess at times.

CK: Yeah.

I literally have been part of conversations where a doctor has said and has left because of continual EMR issues. That’s just not what they signed up for.

They’re either working in a system that’s antiquated or something that, to the earlier comment, can’t work at the pace that they want to work. And it’s become an unfortunate norm for that workday to extend well beyond the clinic hours into the evening if they’re wrapping up notes or doing summaries or continuing their tasks.

One practice that I met at a conference recently had an initiative for 2026 which was no after-hours work in the EMR.

People want to get their job done, so they’re going to put the time into it. But their initiative was to get rid of that and it was ambitious because there’s still only a certain number of hours in the day.

But technology has to work at the pace of the provider, at the pace of care. And that’s fast. Any system issue, whether it’s the software or the infrastructure, can impact that.

And again, we’ve seen staff leave, we’ve seen providers leave. And even if they don’t take it that far, it at least can impact their outlook on things.

MF: Makes sense. Okay, great. I think, Chris, we’ve done a really good job laying out the reality of the situation today around operational friction in the environment and what it looks like, how it’s felt by the staff.

Let’s transition over into the cost of that to the business. I’d love it if you could walk us through what it’s like, what does it actually cost a practice? Not necessarily on the technical side of things, but give us at least a view in broad terms of how that shows up in terms of what it costs a business when you have this friction going on.

CK: Yeah, I think different practices are run different ways.

The best-run practices understand their throughput. They understand the metrics within the business that ultimately lead to a billing event because they’ve got to pay the bills, pay the doctors, keep the doors open.

The best practices have clarity around that. They know what procedures and how many they have to perform, how booked or flexible the schedule needs to be.

And the impact of technology in that whole conversation is a continual thread.

To the extent that the EMR is slowing them down or adding extra steps, that’s going to impact that throughput number.

Maybe the baseline is a certain number of procedures or visits a day, but if they were to reduce the steps by two or three, they could add one more. And that could be a 10% impact on profitability or revenue.

There are some tools now coming within electronic medical record systems, and some of those are AI-based, that can help with that and prompt for other questions that are leading to more comprehensive care, which may actually lead to a higher billing rate ultimately.

So, the tech, not just the efficiencies but how it’s used in the practice, can have an impact on profitability on the revenue side and on the cost side.

It’s really going to be dependent on that specialty and the types of procedures they perform. A pediatric practice is going to be different than an orthopedic practice. But you can think of it in terms of throughput.

Throughput is impacted by poorly performing IT and by processes that are inefficient.

And it’s very reasonable to say that you’re going to get another 10% out of this system if all the pieces are working right, or more.

Whatever that metric is in your world for the practice, if you add 10% to that or take 10% away if you’re having an issue, or stop it altogether if you have a cyber event or some type of server outage, it really does come down to dollars and cents for the practice.

It can impact things positively or negatively depending on how things are running.

MF: I have to assume it could cost growth. So, this could be costing you the ability to grow that next location that you have been talking about wanting to expand to or that new procedure that you want to roll out.

That stuff could potentially get stuck because the business can’t move at a scale necessary to do these new things. I would have to assume that’s also a true cost from a dollars-and-cents perspective to the daily operations, but it’s costing you growth, isn’t it?

CK: Yeah.

It is. Sometimes it’s just not quantified.

I was in a practice that had multiple locations. Because of the systems, it was completely a systems limitation. It was a limitation of how their phone system worked. It was a limitation of how their EMR was set up.

As the providers moved from locations, and there were reasons why they wanted to see patients in one part of the state one day and another part of the state another day, they had to bring their care team with them to each of the locations.

The same person that was doing triage and phone service moved with them.

This is 2026. We’ve got technology that allows us to route calls properly and work in systems. In this case, they couldn’t. They didn’t have that flexibility.

So that entire team needed to move with the doctor as they moved. It was part of that “this is how we’ve done it” mentality. They had accepted that these are how the systems were.

And in some cases, the site was convenient for the doctor, but not convenient for the staff. So that creates all types of things.

If they wanted to grow and add other locations, they’ve got to have this whole other staffing discussion just because they want to add another location.

They were looking for ways to improve their bottom line and to grow. They had some new doctors in the practice and they wanted to expand further, but they had these limitations.

So that’s an extreme example of whole groups of staff moving. But the underlying issue is accepting the way things are and not really thinking through how the technology impacts growth.

And the earlier story I told where that physician founder felt like technology was an accelerator of his growth, because the way that we designed the systems, really all they needed to do was find the real estate.

They found the real estate. They had the operations team, the recruiters, the credential team that could bring the doctors in and get everybody set up.

And we had our marching orders. Once we got to a dust-free date when the site was ready, we came in with the tech. We already had the circuits provisioned. And it was never a limiter of their growth.

It was in fact an accelerator because they knew they could just add on sites.

MF: Yeah, that’s ultimately how we know we’re doing our job right, when it becomes an accelerator for folks. That’s great.

But oftentimes there’s work to be done to get to that point where it becomes an accelerator.

I know you spend a lot of time in a consultative approach with practices and practice owners and leaders inside the practice. What is probably the most striking thing that, once you consult with them and you show them and they see maybe for the first time the breadth and the depth of what the friction that exists is costing the business, what’s an example of something striking that you’ve heard a practice owner say to you when that light bulb goes off?

CK: Probably the most impactful has been statements around their ability to help and keep the business profitable.

You don’t usually think about IT and keeping the doors open and keeping the lights on. But when you have the flexibility to add a new location or add a new service or open a new surgery center, that can be transformational for the business.

I’ve seen that happen more than once where opening their eyes to how they can grow their business has been impactful.

Private medical practices are unique. The physicians are the owners. They’re the entrepreneurs. They’re also the product. So, they’ve got to be there to deliver the product.

Usually, they don’t get all the time they want to focus on the business. And that’s the part that suffers, their health but also the health of the business.

The most striking and gratifying things that I hear are about how we help them grow, sustain and protect their business, which is not something they always get to focus on.

We also support practices that are part of groups or organizations that are scaling by bringing in new locations. That’s just as important.

When they’re acquiring practices, how you bring those sites in and how you onboard them, we’re involved in a lot of that.

One of the experiences recently was a practice that was acquired. They were really fearful about the whole process.

It’s scary. The physician owners kind of understand what’s going on. They’re selling or joining a larger group, and they have their own anxieties.

But for the staff, that’s 10x. What’s going to change? How is my job going to be affected? What’s this new IT team going to be like?

We received an email from a practice owner who had sold to a larger group and had a lot of anxiety for him and his staff about how that was going to go.

It was glowing about how smooth that process went. From literally on a Friday seeing their last patient under their current systems and then we got to work replacing computers, changing equipment, bringing new phones in and cutting things over.

Lots of planning went ahead of that to make that go smoothly.

Monday morning came, we were there for day-one support helping them. Their staff was happy. The patients didn’t even notice the blip.

And then the continued support after that was engaged and thoughtful. That made them feel better about that whole process.

We don’t always understand the care side in their specialty, but we certainly understand the business and the tech side and the things that we do to help them really make a difference.

MF: Yeah, you mentioned a few times just recently about staff and the pressure on staff. We talked earlier about how important retention is and the cost to replace staff who get burned out and tired of operational drag or friction.

How directly does that friction connect to physician burnout?

We talk about staff who are bearing the brunt, whether at the front desk or back office or what have you, but are you seeing this translate into the physicians and owners themselves as well?

CK: Yeah.

I think the extended workdays are a really good, unfortunate example that is systemic. They’re never really off. There’s always something to do.

I hear and experience anxiety in some of the physician owners that we work with. That anxiety could be around cyber risks.

If they don’t understand that they’re secure, then that fear and doubt can really impact them. Or if they’ve experienced an incident before or know somebody that has.

Anxiety is certainly something they’re worried about, their practice, their people, their ability to continue operating as a business.

I think the extended hours, the actual workload and how that impacts their life balance, and the anxiety that comes generally around cyber, all impact them.

Education and the conversation really help, but it absolutely impacts the physicians and physician owners too.

MF: And let’s keep on talking about the physician or practice owner.

One of the things sometimes most concerning that we hear is, “I don’t really think I’ve got any issues with my IT because I don’t have any major issues. The last six months it’s been required, I’m not seeing anything pop up.”

And I know for us in the industry that puts some immediate red lights on.

Talk a little bit about how a practice owner actually knows whether their IT environment is performing or underperforming.

CK: Good question. There’s a couple of ways.

One is when there are problems, how quickly are they resolved?

First of all, the best issue is no issue at all. If you’re in an environment where you’re continually having trouble tickets and system problems, that’s a red flag. It doesn’t need to be that way.

Our philosophy is if we see a ticket that comes in once, okay, maybe that was something isolated.

If it comes in twice, now there’s something going on here and we need to dig in deeper. Is it an education issue? A systems problem? Software?

Recurring issues, even if they’re resolved, are a flag.

One of the things that we do at PEAKE during our IT business reviews is look with the practice at a summary of where the problems are. We work ahead of that to understand whether there are trends and what we can do.

In many cases it’s just a user education thing. So, we’re proactive about that.

You should be getting some type of dashboard or visibility into the problems happening in the practice.

Because if you’re doing your job right, you’re many layers removed from the day-to-day trouble tickets and issues.

But you still need a way of seeing that in a distilled way to know whether there are systemic problems.

So, lack of proactivity around solving an issue or lack of visibility can mean they just don’t know what they don’t know because they’re not being given the visibility by their IT team.

Then, from time to time, there are outages. When there is an outage, how quickly were we able to recover?

In the new HIPAA requirements, there’s a 72-hour recovery window. That seems like a long time, and it is. But what happens to your practice if you were down for three days? If you weren’t able to see patients for three days, how impactful is that?

We’ve seen practices down for a week or more. In some cases, they were never able to recover certain amounts of data.

Maybe it was a PACS imaging system that had a drive fail that wasn’t properly backed up or the backups weren’t tested.

So, you should be hearing from your IT team or having the conversation about disaster recovery.

Disaster is a big word, but that could be something as small as what if our internet circuit goes down?

Do we have a secondary internet? Can we go to cellular? Do we have another system?

There should be clear communication between the practice and the IT team around recovering from events.

A modern server technology, if it’s in the cloud, should recover near instantaneously or even undetectably. If it’s on a server, it can also be engineered so that there’s no downtime.

And there’s always a cost conversation around how close to zero downtime you want to get.

Even if it’s server-based, there should be redundant drives or on-premise backup.

Those things need to be tested. The worst backup is one that hasn’t been tested because you don’t know if it’s actually going to work when you need it.

These should be high-level conversations with your IT team, and they should be able to show you evidence that they’ve tested backup restoration, internet circuit failover and these things.

You don’t need to get into the details, but you need visibility into what that team is doing around recovery.

And again, with the new HIPAA requirements, that’s going to be something called out specifically.

MF: All of this can sound really daunting to somebody who’s a physician and not an IT or technical mind.

You guys have built a relatively straightforward scorecard approach where you can walk into a customer and pinpoint where that friction occurs and isolate it into specific actions.

Maybe tell us a little bit about that because if I’m a physician right now, I may think, “Yeah, I’ve got some problems. It’s costing me time and stress, but I don’t want to go through a huge overhaul.”

There’s a more straightforward and streamlined path forward, correct?

CK: Yeah, we call that our technology alignment approach.

It happens when a new practice onboards with us, but it also happens continually with practices that have been with us for years.

Today it’s about 180 points that come from HIPAA guidance, our own best practices, and things we’ve observed in the best-run practices. At a very simple level, it’s a checklist.

It’s a way for us to go in during onboarding. The practice is functional today unless things are hard down. Things are working at one level, but maybe not optimally.

Within that first 90 days we perform this technology alignment assessment.

It results in a gap analysis: here’s best practice, here’s HIPAA requirements, here’s where the practice is.

We can highlight those and translate that into a letter grade that everyone understands.

Maybe it’s a C or D today. We’re going to understand why and explain where the gaps are.

Then we prioritize the ones that matter most first, usually around security and the highest user impact.

We then come out of that assessment with a three- or four-quarter plan to bring the practice into alignment.

And we continue that process at least once a year, but in most cases twice a year.

That includes everything from whether servers are up to date and networking equipment is configured properly, to things like whether there’s a lock on the IT closet and proper passwords on guest internet. People expect guest Wi-Fi today.

So, we step through that and create a plan. We help the practice prioritize spending and timing.

There’s always a story. There are always initiatives. Maybe this quarter isn’t good because they’re opening a new location.

So, we plan with the practice in a multi-stage process to get them into alignment and keep them there.

That’s our technology alignment approach and it has been very effective.

It feels good when the practice is running at an A level and they understand why.

The proof is in the stability and security of the environment and really feeling like things are frictionless.

And that’s a great place to be.

MF: Great. Chris, thank you.

We’ll try to give you a chance to catch your breath. I know you’ve been on the hot seat here for about 45 minutes.

We’ve got a good audience out there. There’s a Q&A tab on the chat and with the size of audience we have, there’s bound to be some questions.

We’d love to spend five or 10 minutes entertaining Q&A.

Maybe while people are thinking and typing, Chris, a topic that comes up a lot is that people already have an IT provider that’s been doing work for them for a long time.

How does somebody on the call today know whether that IT services provider is doing the right job for them?

How do they keep tabs on them?

CK: Good question.

I had that question this morning from a potential client who said, “Can you help me evaluate my IT team?”

What I offered was that I can give you some questions to ask, and their ability to answer those questions and the speed at which they answer them will tell you something.

For us, all we do is support medical practices.

One of the primary friction points and specialty areas is security.

So, asking questions around HIPAA compliance, particularly with the new rules coming, is important.

There will be many new requirements if things go through as expected by the third or fourth quarter of this year.

How that IT team is responding to that and what systems and solutions they’re putting in place matters.

There will be new tools required that weren’t needed before.

Hearing it from the staff is another way. Ask your staff about their interactions with the IT team.

Are they responsive? Do they get the answers they need? Do they understand workflows and processes?

Because we only support medical practices, we’ve gotten to know almost all of the major EMR systems.

The PEAKE team can provide tier-one or tier-one-and-a-half support for systems like Athena, ECW and Veradigm.

That’s not always something you find in every IT team.

So, asking your staff questions and asking questions around IT security and the coming HIPAA rules are good ways to start.

MF: That’s great. Thank you. A question that just came in: “How do I know what kind of AI tools are right for us?”

CK: Yeah. Great question.

That’s a conversation I’m having a lot these days.

We’re paying a lot of attention to this space and there are probably thousands of AI tools available for medical practices. It’s noisy.

We’ve built a tool called AI Lab that’s on our resources page, and also at PEAKEAILab.com, where you can pick your specialty, EMR system and the problem you’re trying to solve.

We’ve looked out at the marketplace to identify AI tools that are available. In some cases, we’ve tested and reviewed them.

That’s one way.

The EMR providers themselves are also doing quite a bit inside their platforms.

The best place to start is what is happening inside your EMR and practice management system. Probably 80% of what you’re trying to do can and should happen within your EMR. Then there are ancillary processes and tools you’re trying to solve for.

So, staying plugged into your medical society, state medical board or MGMA is important. There’s a lot of good content coming out of those groups. Some of it is vendor-oriented, so you have to filter through that.

Using tools like PEAKE AI Lab is another way. We help practices navigate selecting and implementing AI tools if they’re clients of ours.

It is fully reasonable to expect AI guidance from your IT team. They should be providing that guidance contextual to the applications you’re using. I’m seeing a divide between the IT teams that can do that and the ones that can’t. That’s becoming an important part of technology guidance today.

MF: I agree with you on the expectation from an IT provider that that’s becoming table stakes.

Even as a technology company in Omega, it’s daunting some days just to keep up with all the different language models and the evolution of updates.

Put yourself in a physician’s shoes who isn’t focused on technology every day like we are.

It’s really important to have a trusted partner that can advise on what to use, how to use it, how to create the right data governance structure around it, and ensure the investment is yielding results.

CK: Yep. There are a lot of shiny things out there right now. So, it does take diligence and patience.

MF: Absolutely. I don’t see any other questions, Chris. I think for the group we’ve got a poll question we’d like to put in front of everybody.

“How confident are you that your current IT environment is not costing your practice money right now?”

Be honest. We’d love to understand this more.

Chris, while people are responding, what are your thoughts?

CK: I think this question is a reframing of how IT and technology are working for you.

I don’t think practice owners or administrators really think about the financial impact of poorly performing or underperforming technology.

The AI discussion is a good example.

There are likely tools available that can improve practice efficiency. If you’re not being guided to those tools, that’s impacting your bottom line one way or another.

And looking at the results, “not confident” appears to be the overwhelming leader.

MF: Yeah, and perhaps not terribly surprising.

But hopefully for those who spent some time with us today, you found the conversation and ideas helpful.

We know your time is extremely valuable and we appreciate you spending 60 minutes of your busy day with us.

We’re going to follow up afterward with a version of the scorecard framework Chris described to help everybody think about how best to assess or reassess their environment.

Chris, any closing remarks?

CK: Yeah, this has been great.

Thanks, Mike, for the questions and dialogue.

I know this topic is important to a lot of people based on the participation today.

I look forward to any follow-ups and having deeper conversations about technology, how it can improve the practice and how they navigate AI.

I’d love to continue the conversation.

MF: Wonderful. Thank you, Chris. Thank you to everybody who took the time to join. Have a great rest of your day.

CK: See you everybody.