Preparing for a Health Pandemic

The past few weeks have been interesting, as several customers have inquired about how to best prepare for a health pandemic. Within this same period of time, one of our industry’s largest conference, HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society), cancelled its conference (with 42,000 registered participants) due to concerns about COVID-19, commonly known as coronavirus. Clearly, our industry—and society as a whole—are paying attention and investigating next steps for dealing with this outbreak.

Specifically, many companies are in the early stages of planning for some type response to the current concerns over coronavirus. We’re mostly seeing companies putting a pandemic plan in place, so that they can activate it in the event that the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) elevates the alert for the US. Among other things, they’re assessing their technological readiness to allow employees to work from home, if and when it’s needed, at a moment’s notice.

For some companies, this is going be incredibly easy, as they’ve already factored in modern best practices around what we call a “mobile-first” philosophy. It’s a simple design goal that says if you can architect your communication solutions (encompassing both Unified Communications/Collaboration and Contact Center) to assume that your users will always be mobile, then the more traditional, non-mobile users sitting at their desk become easy to accommodate. Designing for mobile-first forces you to address some of the more challenging aspects of this type of solution, including scalability, reliability, security, and even a little bit of unpredictability. It also forces you to address a modern zero-trust enterprise networking strategy that accounts for internal and external users. Above all, it forces you to do all of this while keeping your employees efficient and productive.

Many of the companies that have adopted this design philosophy did so because of previous national or international healthcare scares, like the H1N1 Swine Flu in 2009 or SARS in 2003. In addition, many companies looked at those design philosophies and realized they were just good design criteria, period, and so mobile-first has become something to design for regardless of any potential pandemic events.

As mentioned, not all companies have embraced this model yet. However, whether it’s to prepare for a potential pandemic or simply because it’s the best way to architect a system even when there are absolutely no health concerns, there are best practices companies should be embracing to make them adaptable for situations like this. There are a number of powerful solutions that, when combined with modern best practices, can help companies weather any event.

In my next blog post, I will further explore the importance of embracing a mobile-first philosophy and share the main considerations that arise when supporting mobile users.

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Now You Can Be Ready to Respond

Special offers, provided by ConvergeOne partners, are now available!

We’ve mobilized a task force and built a consolidated action plan to meet the business challenges you may be facing due to travel restrictions and supply chain disruptions. We are prepared to provide you with guidance, resolution, and support in an informed and rapid manner.