With the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) in 2012, HIPAA privacy requirements relative to patient records were strengthened and expanded. The act required that US physicians and medical practitioners transition from paper records to electronic medical records (EMR) by 2014. 

Workers are challenged by any number of systemic inefficiencies in modern IT infrastructures, especially those rife with Legacy solutions that are difficult to eliminate from the workflow. In the last decade, however, a solution has started to gain traction with organizations, especially those that embrace the increasingly popular managed IT services approach to managing IT infrastructure. One major shift that comes with the embrace of managed IT services is the shift of onsite storage systems and servers to a cloud storage-focused model.

Before managed services and cloud-migrations started to reshape the information technology landscape, the Chief Information Officer was responsible for overseeing an organization’s IT resources and staff. It was considered a back-office role and often seen as existing in the C-suite tier in title only, as they were often working in the trenches alongside staff and in the day-to-day operations.

With cell phones keeping us directly connected with clients and coworkers, private messaging programs pinging in our pockets throughout the day, and other forms of interoffice communication taking up vast portions of our days, it almost feels like email is an unnecessary anomaly, just one more avenue of messaging to manage.

As we collectively take our first tentative steps into 2021, we are all struggling to gauge what the path forward should look like and what the year holds. It’s a challenging economic landscape, to be sure. And while some businesses are being extremely hesitant and cautious, some of you will be better served to be more aggressive in setting yourself up for success in the new year.