While quality of care is a major factor when patients choose a healthcare facility, convenience is now becoming another key consideration. Online scheduling, in particular, has become more and more important in selecting a healthcare provider.

Even if the use of smartphones, tablets, and other internet-connected devices has already permeated society, many healthcare facilities have trouble keeping up with the times. But those that have kept up with tech trends have seen an uptick in both the number of patients they take in and the quality of care they are able to provide, while facilities relying on the old ways continue to remain stagnant in both areas.

Online scheduling is one of the simplest and most popular technologies used by forward-thinking health clinics and hospitals. It allows patients to see when a doctor is available and schedule an appointment on your website. Practices that use online scheduling are able to reap the following benefits. 

More potential new patients

Today, people are less inclined to make phone calls, especially if it involves ringing up someone they don’t know. For many people looking for a new doctor or specialist, they will simply keep looking for one that has online scheduling to avoid calling. 

More time for your staff, better care for your patients

Think about how much time your staff spend each day answering phone calls from people making an appointment. It’s probably a lot if you have a busy practice. Online scheduling lessens phone time required so that your staff can better focus and care for patients at your facility. As a result, patients will feel truly cared for and will more likely return to the healthcare facility in the future.

Setting appointments beyond clinic hours 

In the past, patients had to wait for the clinic to open just to make an appointment. With online scheduling, patients can simply log in to your website and see when you are available so they can plan their schedule accordingly around their visit.

Still unsure whether you need online scheduling?

Sure, you probably can get away with not having it at the moment, but eventually, most patients will expect this technology from you. And the sooner you roll out online scheduling, the sooner your staff will get the hang of it, and the sooner your patients can enjoy its benefits. 

Need help setting up online scheduling for your practice? Talk to our IT experts today and we’ll make sure this technology will make things easier for your patients.

The post 3 Benefits of online scheduling appeared first on Complete Technology Resources, Inc..

Virtualizing your servers, networking devices, and other machines can drastically lower costs and dramatically shorten IT infrastructure deployment times. However, implementing this requires a lot of IT expertise that can’t just be pulled off by regular technicians. Here are three things specialists consider when managing virtualization efforts.

Backing up data can be such a hassle
Incorporating a robust backup system in a virtualized setting can become a huge challenge. This is because you have to determine which data you want to store and how often it should be backed up, then you have to decide whether you should back up all your virtual machines or just some vital ones that have important apps and data.

In short, the amount of data that needs to be backed up can be overwhelming. The only way to overcome this is to integrate a powerful virtual backup solution offered by a reputable managed services provider (MSP).

Ensuring security complicates the virtualization process
Security concerns are more complicated in a virtualized setting since you have to monitor security on a couple of tiers: virtual machine security and physical host security.

If a physical host server is compromised, let us say by someone plugging in an infected USB drive into one of its ports, it will affect every virtual machine running on it. In a similar way, a compromised virtual machine may disrupt the physical server and may affect other virtual machines residing on the same host.

To address this, you need to set up strong network defenses, including firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, antivirus software, and virtual machine security tools. Beyond these, you also need a hardened physical security system comprised of surveillance cameras, locks, biometric scans, and security guards. Of course, if you don’t have the funds to set these up, it may make more sense to leave it to a security-conscious MSP.

Monitoring your systems is resource-intensive
Since your team has to oversee both virtual machines and physical servers to ensure you have a fully operational environment, they’ll experience a couple of pain points.

First, running monitoring software on a physical host server is likely to impede the performance of the virtual machines on that server since the former takes up precious processing power and memory. You’ll practically have to monitor your monitoring system to ensure that it’s not hogging the resources of your servers.

Second, keeping tabs on your virtual machines and making sure they’re secure and running at all times is a full-time job. So unless you have a team of professionals in-house, you’ll definitely need some help from the outside.

Without a doubt, virtualization brings a lot of benefits to the table, but you have to know how it affects every aspect of your business. Let us show you how you can use it to its full potential. Just give us a call today!

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