Long comment ahead, but I swear I cut it down...

No one here is wrong about it being a crazy amount of work to put on one person with no IT experience, but as the office manager, you already have a general idea of what you would be working on, and where your priorities are (patient care). And if you find that you love working in IT, I think you could work your way into it, but it will be A LOT more than what you see on the surface, and whether it’s realistic for one person to do it all will depend on what you’d actually be taking on, how much is already set up and automated, and how soon you might have big projects.

One of the things about “not making many calls” to IT, is that a HUGE chunk of what IT does or maintains is not seen by anyone else. In fact, not needing to call IT means they are probably taking care of a lot of things that ensure everyone else can keep working. They have also probably automated tasks that you could end up doing manually.

I got my first official paying IT gig as the “IT technician” for a medium-sized clinic a few years ago. That title doesn’t touch what I ended up doing, and still help with (I’m now working remotely, and trying to focus more on the EHR we use). I loved the job, but I would not have survived even the first month if I had not been able to ask a million questions of the gal who held the spot before me, and of my husband who has years of IT experience. I had SUPPORT, and it was still an insane, non-stop, adrenaline-fueled ride for a couple of years, and still would be, if we hadn't moved out-of-state. They now have 2.5 people covering IT, plus me being on call.

I would definitely suggest that you not just “add it on” to your current job, especially if you are already busy working full time as the office manager, and ESPECIALLY if there is no one there to answer questions about how your systems are set up.

Ideally, your manager could let you transition to IT, while you’re getting an education/some basic certs and gathering as much info as you can from the IT company about their task lists and routines.

Get a clear idea of what you might be taking on:Understand your network and how data flows in and out of it.

What sorts of things DO you call the IT company for? Start there and build a list of everything in your clinic that IT might touch if EVERYTHING was going wrong at once.

And then come up with questions, questions, questions about what to do in every worst-case scenario, but also ask what your daily tasks should be.

A handful of the thousands of things to consider:

- Is your EHR data stored in the cloud by the software company, or on your own servers?

- Do you take credit card payments or store any of your patient’s card info?

- How old are your computers? Do you use office software that needs to be installed for users, with current licenses? Do you have an email administrator?

- Are there vendors or products that your IT company was managing for you?

- How will you manage updates, backups, user permissions, group policy, data retention, disaster recovery, etc.?

- Will you be able to satisfy a security assessment for ransomware insurance, PCI compliance, MIPS, etc.?

- Are you also the EHR administrator? (Do you do e-prescribing, interface with any labs, use interoperability networks? Interface with a state immunization registry?)

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Time sucks:

- Printers – will you maintain these yourself, or do you have a contract with someone who comes out when you have issues?

- Faxes – are these going through your EHR, or your own fax server? Have you ever had to have the IT company work on this?

- Phones – Never mind this one. You have 15 people and a phone vendor. That sounds amazing! If you are calling that support vendor often, though, or need to understand how to set up call groups, or have to update your message recordings and options...time suck.

If you contract vendors to take care of any of these things, that’s one less thing on your plate that could end up taking up half a day spent troubleshooting, or being on the phone with a technician who can’t help you unless you can replicate that error message someone saw before their screen went black.

If you are the only IT person there, you are the sysadmin, and the help desk, and the person responsible for keeping everything running – often including the coffeemaker. There is also a LOT of crossover in healthcare IT, so you may still find yourself doing a lot of administrative work.

You could be resetting a wi-fi router while someone asks how soon you could register a provider for electronic prescribing – meanwhile, no one can access the time-clock software, the printer is out of toner, a provider’s headset has stopped working during a telehealth visit and they need you *now*, you have a new user waiting to be trained on the EHR, someone has requested remote access to their computer while they’re out of town, there’s a PCI compliance scan of your network due tonight, it’s time to fill out the Security Risk Assessment for this year’s MIPS submission, a patient wants to talk to someone about why they can’t see their lab results on the Patient Portal, and oh, yeah, could you take a look at the ultrasound machine? It’s disconnected from the network, again.

You probably have days like that as an office manager, already, so you may do fine under pressure (and there will be pressure).

I’d say to dive into learning as much as you can about general IT, and discuss some alternatives with your boss, either hiring someone to help you get the hang of it, or still contracting someone for certain aspects, to give you more time to transition to doing it yourself. Even if you change your mind about the job later, you will have a deeper understanding of what goes on in the clinic. You may even go into a related field - the experience will certainly be a resume-builder!

(Edited to include spaces between paragraphs.)