Supporting an evolving, complex technology stack along with the needs of both internal and external customers is not easy for IT vendors. Automation and artificial intelligence will redesign the way in which tech support firms function and the result is a support operation that will look significantly changed from what exists in 2018.
“IT support will become much more customer-facing, but also much more robotic,” said Doug Brown, Managing Partner of Black Book Research. “The power of automation and the rise of the patient experience are disrupting an idling tech support sector as vendors restate relevance in the client services space.”
Healthcare providers and payers are experiencing the early stages of a bigger transformation of how healthcare organizations look at the role of tech support.
- AI and automation: Artificial intelligence, chatbots, and other forms of automation are now grabbing attention within most of the systems targeted at the healthcare IT support industry, but there’s not a lot of companies employing them. Only 3% of healthcare providers and % of payers responding to the Black Book survey have launched automated client service strategies.
- Client experience: EHRs are putting significant resources toward the creation and protection of experience-based customer value. Delivering and support a superb customer experience is becoming the primary driver of competitive advantage. Eighty-eight percent of CIO respondents reveal they are beginning to re-imagine the role of the support organization as they recognize technology is now critical to the patient experience and that their existing support teams are not well positioned to provide the best support.
- Blockchain: Blockchain offers a shared, distributed, and decentralized ledger that serves as a foundation for trusted collaboration among multiple parties throughout the tech support processes. As healthcare industry practitioners gain more experience with the technology, the next wave of innovations will be focusing on standardizing blockchain solutions that can be seamlessly integrated with organizations’ IT systems to jointly drive the tech support ecosystem.
- Big data: Healthcare organizations are growing increasingly dependent on big data direct their initiatives. While this tsunami of data can spot trends and enables more accurate and more confident decision-making, it requires more computing power, more hardware, more network capacity and more devices, both traditional and mobile, along with the need for ongoing maintenance of cloud infrastructure, servers, desktops, laptops, and storage and network devices. IT vendors and managed services providers must have a deep pool of skilled subject matter experts available to proficiently service clients and also maintain the certifications to support multiple manufacturers’ hardware, storage devices, operating systems, and networks.
