Advanced Technologies Executive Summary Although the healthcare industry obtains its revenues from sources other than the traditional customer-business transactions, having a competitive edge over rival businesses is a paramount strategic objective for the modern healthcare business to attract customers. Predictable rhetoric among those who seek out medical services is that a patient goes to whatever physician that their insurance will pay for. The actuality is that a patient often has multiple choices of who provides their care. The decision to choose one over the other is dependent on the individual patient.
It is the belief of this individual that ABC Physicians that providing the employees of the organization with the most advanced technologies in hardware will spur increased productivity that will translate to revenues and customer satisfaction for the company. Details of the particular technologies suggested and the departments that will benefit will describe how ABC Physicians will thrive well into the future.
Sales Department and Other Users To stay in line today’s market, companies must make their employees mobile. Having an easy-to-use interface between the sales force and the company network that can be used anywhere at any time will set ABC Physicians apart as a leading healthcare business. Tablets are quickly replacing laptops, and in some cases PCs, as the computing hardware of the modern era. They are smaller, lighter, more mobile devices that allow the sales force to complete transactions and share information at speeds comparable or superior to laptops.
Acquiring tablets for the sales staff that are mobile as a part of their jobs with ABC Physicians will put the company in line with 50 percent of Fortune 100 companies, which are shown to also use tablets for business functions (James, 2012). According to Ricknas, 2012, “the average sales price of tablets was $386 during the first quarter,” of 2012. As the hottest trend in technology at the moment, tablet computers can be purchased from most suppliers of computing hardware.
Marketing
Many major organizations of all colors use some form of social media as part of their marketing strategy and ABC Physicians should be no different. CRM or customer relationship management is an important tool that companies use to consolidate, coordinate, and automate their professional procedures to facilitate their overall marketing strategies. Tying social media such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ into their overall CRM stratagem will set ABC Physicians apart as a modern, connected medical practice that is in tune with today’s consumer who tends to prefer social media, email, and other electronic media as their preferred means of communication.
This also sets a precedent for the future of ABC Physicians as a company; if the primary consumer base tends to be an older demographic that may or may not use social media, then incorporating social media tools into the current CRM procedures now will provide the company with a better idea of how to manage its social media presence for the aging customer who will be the primary customer demographic in the years to come.
Information Technology Department Two words can be used to sum up the future of information technology: the cloud. One of the shortcomings of mobile technology such as tablet computers or smartphones is the lack of adequate storage space for all of one’s important documents and business applications. To counteract this, cloud computing offers access to a user’s documents and applications from any location with an internet connection without storing the documents and applications locally. One of the major strengths of cloud computing for ABC Physicians is the cost; creating VPN connections to virtual desktops on the company’s current servers than allow them access to their