What High-Performing Practices Get Right About IT

Operational efficiency is a buzzword thrown around and often overused in business but it’s the single biggest advantage that an IT provider can transfer to a partner. You might ask, why? And that’s a great question. It’s because at the core of IT, it’s supposed to enable your team to focus on their roles and responsibilities without being interrupted by IT problems. In other words, the more time you and your team spend on seeing patients, increasing patient volume, and providing the excellent care that your practice promises and the less time you spend on passing tickets to and from your provider, the better overall return you’ll see from IT.

This is especially important for smaller practices whose teams are already stretched thin because people typically wear a few hats and need to fill in for different roles. This is the “high performing team paradox.” It’s when practices become too reliant on an excellent team that the team doesn’t stop to report inefficiencies in a process, they just fix it as it comes up and move on. The seconds turn to minutes and minutes to hours. Then, practice grows and the hidden productivity tax grows alongside.

The next logical question is typically, “well am I operationally efficient?” Again, this is a very intelligent progression of questions to be asked. The answer? I, personally, don’t know that for you. But what I can say is there are very common patterns that reveal whether or not the provider you leverage is moving you closer or further away from an operationally efficient setup. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• Where does IT absorb time that it shouldn’t?
• Are clinical or administrative workflows ever slowed by IT?
• Has your ticket count increased or decreased month to month?
• Do small technical interruptions accumulate throughout the week?
• Are providers ever waiting on EMR/PM Systems before seeing patients?
• Are submitted tickets tracked and reviewed for patterns?
• Do issues tend to be reacted to or prevented by your provider?
• Is IT support reducing friction – or responding to it?

The most successful practices we work with asked themselves these questions and were brutally honest in their responses. And again, this isn’t anyone’s fault. Operational systems tend to get evaluated when something breaks down and is an afterthought until it does happen. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? Well, it sounds cool in theory, but with IT, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

A quick firmware update for perspective: An event or disaster isn’t a one-time mistake. It’s a thousand little things left undone over a period of time. Most people just react to the problem, not the symptoms.

Operational efficiency in IT isn’t about perfection. It’s about reducing friction before it compounds. It’s about designing systems where interruptions decrease over time instead of becoming normalized. The practices that scale smoothly aren’t necessarily the ones with the flashiest technology. They’re the ones where IT quietly supports growth, absorbs complexity, and protects team bandwidth. Efficiency is rarely dramatic, it’s measured in fewer interruptions, clearer processes, and reclaimed hours.

If you’re unsure whether your current setup is improving or merely maintaining, that uncertainty alone is worth examining. Because in healthcare, the real cost of inefficiency isn’t technical it’s operational.