Southgate Surgery Center Says Tech Experts Is A Cut Above Other Computer Service Companies

As the health care field becomes more and more competitive, it’s vital that medical practitioners streamline operations and become as efficient as possible.

That’s why Linda Phillips, R.N., the Administrator of Southgate Surgical Center chooses Tech Experts for her company’s computer service and support.

Southgate Surgery Center specializes in same-day surgery for eye and endoscopy procedures, and has been providing same-day surgical procedures since 1983.
 
The Center uses it’s computer systems for patient billing, scheduling, and accounts receivable. E-mail is used for both intra-office communication, and for contact with people outside the practice.
 
“The thing I like most about working with Tech Experts is that we receive prompt, on-site service,” said Linda. “If we’re unable to troubleshoot a problem over the phone, a tech comes to our facility to service us.”
 
Southgate Surgery Center uses a variety of computers, all connected to a Microsoft Windows Small Business Server, Premium Edition. The Premium Edition provided the Center with SQL server, something critical for their daily operations.
 
Tech Experts has also installed a specialized, off-site dictation system, that lets doctors dictate surgical notes off-site and have them trans-ferred automatically to the Surgery Center.
 
“One of the biggest benefits we’ve received by working with Tech Experts is that we have very little downtime,” said Linda. “By eliminating downtime, we’re able to keep operations running smoothly and profitably, because being unable to run daily operations can lead to a loss of revenue.”
 
Southgate Surgery Center finds the on-site service Tech Experts provides very valuable. “Probably the most significant ‘value add’ we receive from working with Tech Experts is the on-site service. There are huge benefits to having someone on-site when there is a problem,” commented Linda.

How To Make Your Business Web Site

Untangling the mystery of the World Wide Web can be a lot like walking into quicksand: The more you get into it, the harder it is to get where you want.
 
Credit the sheer number of sites that populate the Web, creating clutter that makes it hard for small businesses to distinguish themselves.
 
Ultimately, it’s the business owners who devote time to their Websites that reap the greatest rewards online.
 
Business websites are a lot like a car: If you don’t put gas in it and get regular oil changes, it won’t perform for you. The same goes for the Web, where sites that aren’t useful or current do little good for their owners.
 
One way to maximize your Web investment is through a process known as “search engine optimization” or SEO. This combines design elements, text, and keywords to ensure that the site gets the best recognition from the major search engines.
 
To maximize their SEO strategies, companies should define their niche market, then decide how they want that customer base to find them on the Internet.
 
Since it’s getting harder and harder to distinguish yourself online, here are five tips to make a splash on the Web:
 
1: Wow them from the first page. First impressions mean everything on the Web, so your site’s front page must shine in order to be effective.
 
A company’s front page should forgo bandwidth-heavy graphics and instead feature a bulleted list of services and a simple, readily accessible way to contact the company for an estimate or more information.
 
Subsequent pages can showcase your portfolio, testimonials from satisfied customers, and links to free e-newsletters.
 
2: Make it user-friendly. It’s age-old advice, but companies still aren’t adhering. Ease of use equates to both a pleasant visiting experience and marketing effectiveness. Use clear language, useful links, and navigation bars to steer customers in the right direction.
 
3: Make them eager to return soon. Attracting visitors is important, but persuading them to return is even more important.
 
Create long-term online customers by incorporating relevant self-assessment tests, surveys, and other tools with related products and services your business provides. This ensures an educational, interactive experience for the client and is a great marketing tool for your company.
 
Start with a simple biweekly newsletter, a blog, or a chat forum on a topic of interest to your customers.
 
4: Get back to basics. Browse through a few sites and you’ll quickly discover that accessing basic information can be a challenge.
 
To make sure your visitors don’t get turned off by poor navigation, broken links, and irrelevant information, be sure to give them a clear explanation of your product or service, making sure to highlight exactly what makes your firm and its offerings unique.
 
5: Give them the royal treatment. When designing your site, put yourself in your customers’ shoes. What do they want to see or know? What format most suitably presents this information? How can you keep them interested and make the experience fun?

Tracking Down “Bandwith Hogs” - Should You Monitor Employee Internet?

For many businesses, tracking employees use of software and the Internet is an absolute necessity for employers who are juggling productivity with employee privacy while trying to remain competitive in an increasingly fierce market.
 
Many computer professionals consider the problem to be crucial in today’s market.
 
What do you do if you’re an employer, and you want to retain your employees? You must keep salaries high, or they will go else-where. But you also can’t raise your prices, or you will be outpriced by competitors.
 
The answer is to increase productivity. You look around the office but don’t see people wandering the halls or talking at the water cooler. Everyone’s at their computers. The question is, what are they doing at their computers?
 
There is much anecdotal evidence that demonstrates the growth of personal use of computers during business hours, and there are many programs that track the URLs that employees visit, how much time they spend online, and the amount of bandwidth that Internet use is taking up.
 
They also allow employers to monitor which non-Internet programs employees use.
 
Programs like these gives employers a snapshot to show how much activity is spent on non-administrative activity.
 
Some critics see monitoring of employee Internet use as something of an invasion of privacy, but workplace security experts disagree. These programs can tell that an employee is spending four hours a day on eBay, but won’t disclose the actual activity on it.
 
It can tell if someone is consistently downloading unusually large files, but doesn’t disclose the contents of the individual’s e-mail.
 
Many monitoring programs also can tell if employees are spending large amounts of time playing Elf Bowling or Tetris instead of working, and whether more official programs that the company has purchased are being used. If they’re not, then further purchases may be a waste of money.
 
The primary purpose of the software is not to penalize employees for “unofficial” Internet use but rather to pinpoint problem areas in weak-performing employees and to locate “bandwidth hogs” whose overuse of the Internet slows down everyone’s work.
 
Tech Experts offers several solutions to filter, monitor and report on Internet use on a company’s network.
 
Call us today at (734) 457-5000 (toll free 888-457-5001) for more informataion.

“Storm” Worm Makes Anti-Virus Programs Brain Dead

The ever-mutating, ever-stealthy Storm worm botnet is adding yet another trick to its vast repertoire: Instead of killing anti-virus products on systems, it’s now doing a modification to render them brain-dead.
 
The finding was made by Sophos and was mentioned by a security strategist for IBM Internet Security Systems. According to Sophos, the Storm botnet—Sophos calls it Dorf, and it’s also known as Ecard malware— makes programs that interact with Windows, tell the virus every time a new program is started.
 
The virus then checks the program that started to see if it was an anti-virus or anti-spyware program, and if it is, it will either stop the program from running, or modify the program so that it can’t detect the virus.
 
Then, when the anti-virus programs run, they simply tell the user everything is ok. 
 
The strategy means that users won’t be alarmed by their anti-virus software not running.
 
The anti-virus is running but brain-dead, which is worse than shutting it off, since it then opens the door for all sorts of other virus and spyware programs to infect the system.
 
This new behavior the latest evidence of why Storm is the scariest and most substantial threat security researchers have ever seen. The Storm virus is patient, it’s resilient, it’s adaptive in that it can defeat anti-virus products in multiple ways. It changes its virus footprint automatically every 30 minutes.
 
It even has its own mythology: Composed of up to 50 million zombie PCs, it has as much power as a supercomputer, the stories go, with the brute strength to crack Department of Defense encryption schemes.
 
In reality, security researchers in the know peg the size of the peer-to-peer botnet at 6 million to 15 million PCs, and not on par with a supercomputer. And it can’t break encryption keys. Still, it is very dangerous.

Six More Super Effective Search Engine Optimization Tips

 Here are six additional search engine optimization strategies you can start today to bring more traffic to your business web site:
 
1. Include only the most important, meaningful keywords in your site’s title tag or the title that appears in the bar at the top of the web page.
 
2. Make sure your site includes as much information as possible, preferably 250 words on each page.
 
3. Spend the time necessary to know the keywords your prospective clients use to find your firm and its products/services.

4. Don’t try to trick the search engines by loading your site with irrelevant keywords that have nothing to do with your business.
 
5. Don’t allow your most important keywords to be contained in graphics. Try substituting formatted HTML text for graphics.
 
6. Citation mapping, the number of links that point to your Website, is critical to all search engines when assigning ranking.
 
Use as many relevant quality links as possible that point to your site, to guarantee top placement.