At some point most growing practices ask the same question: should we hire someone to handle IT, or work with an outside provider? It is a fair question, and the honest answer depends on your size and needs. Here is a straight comparison, without the sales pitch, so you can think it through.
The real cost of in-house IT
Hiring an IT person feels simple, but the true cost is more than a salary. It is salary plus benefits, payroll taxes, training, tools, and the software and monitoring platforms that person needs to do the job. And a single hire is still one person: they take vacation, they get sick, they cannot be an expert in networking and cybersecurity and EMR integration and compliance all at once, and when they leave, your institutional knowledge walks out the door. For a small or mid-size practice, one generalist is often stretched thin across problems that really need a team.
What an MSP actually provides
A managed service provider is not one person, it is a bench. You get a helpdesk, engineers with different specialties, security monitoring, and compliance support, for a predictable monthly fee rather than a salary plus overhead. The coverage does not disappear when one person is out. For most independent and mid-size practices, that breadth is the main advantage: you are buying a team's worth of capability at a fraction of a team's cost.
Where in-house still makes sense
None of this means in-house is always wrong. Large groups and health systems with heavy, constant, on-site needs often benefit from having staff on the ground, sometimes alongside an MSP in a co-managed arrangement. The question is not which is universally better. It is which fits the size, complexity, and pace of your practice.
The healthcare difference
For a medical practice, there is one more factor that tilts the math: healthcare IT is not general IT. It carries HIPAA obligations, EMR integrations, and specialty workflows that a generalist hire may never have seen. A healthcare-focused MSP brings that experience by default. A single general-IT hire has to learn it on your time, and on your risk.
How to decide
Look honestly at your size, your growth, how much downtime actually costs you, and whether your needs are steady enough to keep one person fully and usefully busy across everything a practice requires. For many practices in Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, a healthcare-focused MSP delivers broader coverage and lower risk than a single hire. For some larger groups, a blend is right.
How Galleon fits
Galleon is a healthcare-first MSP. We bring a full team, a 24/7 Security Operations Center monitored by real human analysts, EMR expertise across the platforms practices actually use, and compliance built in rather than billed as a surprise, with an initial response within 15 minutes per our SLA. If you want to compare what you are spending or planning to spend against what a healthcare MSP would cover, that is a conversation worth having.
Explore our Managed IT Services, take the free IT Risk Assessment, or schedule a discovery call.