The latest information technology solutions carry the promise of helping you keep your business flourishing while maintaining high patient satisfaction. The most innovative products can help you improve collaboration with patients, customers, and other practices, all of which is best for patients and your practice. In reality, this means higher quality of care, greater process efficiency, increased customer satisfaction, and better regulatory compliance.

But to make sure you're getting the right products for your office — and that you're maximizing their utility — it often helps to have an IT staff in place.

But that raises a separate question: Where can you find qualified IT specialists to hire?

For medical practices, hiring the right technical help is a special and important challenge. Do you suspect that there is more you can do with technology to support your clinical operations, but aren't sure exactly how? Are you finding that your network and e-mail systems are in need of attention that is beyond your limited time and expertise? If it's time for your practice to hire an in-house technology specialist to troubleshoot your network, fix the printer, add the new scanning functionality, and handle pretty much anything in between, do you know how to begin?

Hiring a jack-of-all-trades technology professional — a systems administrator — can be more challenging for medical practices than other types of businesses.

You need to find someone who will function like others in your practice and take on whatever there is to do. Interpersonal skills are as important as the technical qualifications that look like gibberish to those of us without technical backgrounds. The antisocial geek who likes to be alone in a dark room with a monitor is not likely to be very helpful to the nurse who is tentative about using a mouse. An IT snob will not help your staff take advantage of the opportunities to bring technology into the practice and gain efficiency in clinical operations.

Reviewing resumes

As you review resumes, look for candidates who have experience applying their skills in practical ways, rather than simply academic accolades. A computer science degree from a four-year school is often slanted toward programming, which is not the jack-of-all-trades IT guru your practice needs. Your dream candidate is more likely to have an associate's degree from a local technical school and/or certification degrees. "Sysadmins," as systems administrators are sometimes called, may have credentials from companies such as Microsoft, Cisco Systems, and IBM, which guarantee a certain level of competence. 

Your systems administrator should have familiarity with network design, load balancing (making sure a single server doesn't get overwhelmed with requests), and security.  Network design means he should be able to figure out which hardware you need and how to make a network run smoothly (it stays "up" and available to staff with a responsiveness that is transparent to the end-users). Of course, he should also know the protocols for data flow —  enough knowledge to troubleshoot and converse with your vendors —  but he does not need to be a world-class programmer.

It would be the icing on the cake if your sysadmin came into the practice understanding the workflow of a medical practice, from patient telephone call processing to ordering tests and tracking results. With knowledge of medical office functions and responsibilities, an IT specialist will recommend technology solutions to apply to the daily processes that can improve operational efficiencies. If you're thinking it's not reasonable to expect one person to know all this cold while also performing the occasional manual hardware repair, you're right.

What is vital, therefore, is hiring someone who knows how to get the answers he needs. Your candidate should belong to technical societies and online chat groups to establish a similar kind of support network that you maintain with your peers. Does your candidate have budgeting and disaster-planning expertise? These would also be nice, but not required. As your practice continues to become more sophisticated in its use of technology, your jack-of-all-trades can develop these skills.

Interviewing a techie

If you don't have much knowledge about technology yourself, it may seem daunting to interview someone who does. How do you know what questions to ask? Start by inquiring about candidates' training and professional memberships. Then you might try these ideas:

Do some role-playing. Be prepared with a couple of scenarios, such as an irate and frustrated user, and watch their body language as they react to each situation. Determine if they can clearly articulate solutions and set expectations while maintaining a good "bedside manner." Describe a current technology problem in the practice and ask the candidates what steps they would take to resolve the issue. Listen for an organized attack plan and for solutions that you had not considered to evaluate each candidate's methodology and attention to detail, and to glean for innovative problem-solving skills.

Ask what forums, FAQ Web sites, and other online support sources the candidate uses, and check these online after the interview. The level of technical support (can you easily understand the discussions and issues?) they offer will guide you to the level of outside technical knowledge to which your candidate looks for assistance.