Is your private practice ‘all systems go’?

Jane Braithwaite

There are so many facets to running a successful private medical practice. Jane Braithwaite’s second article in her practice management series focuses on the functional aspects. She looks at what IT systems you might need to run your practice efficiently and examines mapping the processes that you must streamline for a well-run practice.

As with any business, you will need to give detailed consideration to your IT needs. The difference for a private medical practice is the kind of data you will be storing.

You don’t just need to think about the number of PCs you might need as well as printers and other peripherals. Medical records, patient notes, scans, bank details and even recorded phone calls are all considered personal data under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Even before GDPR was introduced, there were specific requirements for data storage in healthcare. There have previously been some worrying data breaches by companies who stored patient data unencrypted, and GDPR has added punitive fines to ensure that all companies take the issue seriously.

The NHS’s guidelines on using public cloud services such as Google Drive and my previous article on data should be helpful resources.