Hoboken University Medical Center Hires NITHealth to Run IT Department in Outsourcing Pact

Massive Hospital Technology Reconfiguration Sets Stage for Agreement.

Under the two-year agreement, NITHealth will provide planning, infrastructure management, hardware and software upgrades, staffing, training and IT support for all hospital departments.

While it is common for hospitals to outsource some services, such as housekeeping, billing and even some medical departments, outsourcing of IT services is a less common – but growing – phenomenon.

The long-term outsourcing agreement is a continuation of the work that New York-based NIT began last year when it was retained to help with the massive data migration necessitated when the City of Hoboken began the process of acquiring St. Mary’s, now known as Hoboken University Medical Center. The data migration entailed extensive medical and administrative records, as well as other technology reconfigurations — all of which needed to be accomplished without disruption to the daily operations of the 328-bed hospital.

“We had a seamless data migration,” said Ronald DiVito, Chief Financial Officer of HUMC. “There was not a bump during the process. Under our multi-year deal with NIT, they will work with us beyond the migration stage, finding and implementing IT solutions that fit the hospital’s growing needs.”

Lior Blik, NIT’s President and CEO, has served as the hospital’s Acting Chief Information Officer since the migration project began. “This outsourcing arrangement benefits the hospital in many ways,” says Blik. “By outsourcing, the hospital gets the benefit of a variety of knowledge bases. As a consulting firm, we support numerous networks and can optimize respective IT systems to specific businesses. In addition, we can bring in technicians and project managers as needed, then shrink the staff again when a project is done, eliminating significant human resources issues for the hospital.”

Blik believes in focusing on the client’s bottom line in his work. “One of the values we bring to all of our clients is cost savings,” he says. “We do not take vendors’ recommendations for granted; we question them and seek alternatives. Being an independent provider of IT management,” Blik says, “gives us the ability to use our experience to negotiate the best contracts and optimal solutions on behalf of the client.”

For a hospital that lost $25 million last year before its transition to public ownership, such savings are critical. Says Blik, “NIT is very pleased to contribute to the financial turnaround of HUMC by assuming a significant role in its IT affairs.”

HUMC’s DiVito says the hospital is profitable today, which he attributes in part to NIT’s work. “Key to the success of the city’s takeover of St. Mary’s/HUMC was the significant cost savings HUMC realized in its IT Department,” said DiVito. “NIT was helpful in negotiating contracts and saving us money with software providers, including minimally $80,000 per month on application hosting alone. Their knowledge of specific healthcare information applications, such as radiology film inventory system, probably saved us an additional $2 million.”

Blik described the extensive data migration and related IT efforts. “We migrated all users within this healthcare system into a new network connecting the five major buildings of the hospital to a 6-mb Internet line, installed new firewalls and spam filters, developed a much faster backbone, increasing the LAN from 10mb to 1 gig, and established new IT policies to ensure proper operations, maintenance and compliance. To-date we have migrated about one terabyte of data, and we lost nothing.”

The migration affected 1,100 staff members and involved mostly administration and financial departments. The hospital’s medical data will be migrated in the next phase of the technology transfiguration, which is ongoing.

The most important benefit to the hospital of outsourcing its IT operation, Blik believes, is the objectivity he and the NIT technicians bring to their work. “We’re an IT company,” he says. “that brings the ability to mobilize the necessary resources to implement projects in a cost-effective, time efficient manner and with little or no disruption to patient care, as we have demonstrated in HUMC. Our experience and ability to act on behalf of the hospital enables us to negotiate better contracts with third-party information systems vendors, which may generate considerable savings to the institution. The saved funds not only help the overall financial strength of the hospital, but also free resources to new services sought by the clinical departments.”

“When assuming the responsibility for the IT affairs of a major healthcare provider such as a hospital,” adds Blik, “it’s important to recognize the financial goals and abilities of the organization and assess specifically where significant cost savings can be realized, so funds may be available to support new services.”

NITHealth (http://www.nithealth.com) is a premier provider of computer networking management services, specializing in serving the healthcare providers, including hospitals, clinics, specialty service provides and physician practices. Services provided by NIT include IT management, network installation and support, network infrastructure management, application support, CRM management and other services. NITHealth is a unit of NIT Connect (http://www.nitconnect.com).