Healthcare IT & Transformation

Proprietary vendors out Enterprise layers in

So what do I mean by enterprise layers? I’ve observed an abundance of IT staff supporting lots of applications with duplicate crossover functionality such as faxing, scanning, reporting, etc. Proprietary vendors are bundling their own (or third party) solutions for these common requirements and the results are many healthcare organizations have many different applications that fax, scan, report, etc. These types of generic functions are perfect candidates for enterprise solutions. How many ways do you really need to fax? Each additional faxing solution requires infrastructure to support it and support staff to maintain it. Moving to enterprise layers can reduce the number of applications supported and, thus, reduce support costs. It also enables consistency across the enterprise.

Further distressing is the number of proprietary databases still used for domain specific applications in healthcare. The reign of the proprietary vendor is still strong in healthcare.

How can you identify these proprietary vendors?

Ask these questions:

1. What database do they use? Is it one of the industry leaders such as Oracle, SQL Server or DB2? Is it a database you’ve chosen as a standard? Do you have a choice of database?
2. What about hardware platform? Is it an industry leader? Choice?
3. Do you have read or read/write access to the database? Don’t accept no access. It implies a problem with their choice of database or their data model.
4. Do you have access to all their servers? If you have vendor-only supportable infrastructure chances are you’re dealing with a proprietary vendor.
5. Ask them if they can integrate with your enterprise layers. If you don’t have enterprise layers yet ask if they can integrate with some of the industry leaders in each area:
• Captaris RightFax - for your faxing functionality
• Kofax or EMC Captiva - for your scanning functionality
• IBM Content Manager or EMC Documentum - for document management
• Cognos, Busines Objects, Oracle Brio - for reporting and business intelligence

I predict the trend of proprietary vendors in healthcare will completely reverse over the next 3-5 years. Software vendors who don’t embrace interoperability solutions and who resist using industry standard technologies will die off. My recommendation: don’t hitch your wagon to their train. These proprietary software practices have mostly been eradicated in highly automated industries as the industries themselves have insisted on applications supporting their standards.

So how can you make a difference?

Understand that progressive vendors already have interoperable solutions or are working quickly towards them. They’ll still try to sell you their proprietary solutions first. Why wouldn’t they? It is more money in their pockets. IT software buyers have to be sophisticated enough to know when to push back.

Plan and implement industry recognized enterprise layers and then require that all new software vendors integrate with these layers.

Don’t be afraid! They’ll comply or they won’t survive.

Many hospitals and healthcare systems still don’t have a plan for enterprise layers to support common functions. By not having a plan, you allow proprietary vendors to hold you captive.

Another observation I made of the healthcare industry is the conspicuous absence of many of the large enterprise vendors. They are present on the infrastructure side but not on the application side as much. What causes this phenomenon? I believe this has happened for three main reasons:

1. Healthcare has many domain specific application vendors and they are masters of demonstrating their products in their domain specific spaces
2. Healthcare, like government, still has an organizational structure that enables separate department silos to operate independently. These silos only consider their own narrow needs when choosing software. Without someone considering the application across the enterprise, a domain specific solution is almost always chosen
3. Enterprise vendors don’t have enough healthcare experience yet to demo their products competitively against domain specific vendors

Be a visionary leader! Choose enterprise layers for your organization and turn the tables on proprietary vendors.

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