Selling Healthcare IT In The Age Of Integration
By Megan Williams, contributing writer
Right now, your healthcare IT clients see most of their technology as islands, but that’s all changing. At the Smart VAR Healthcare Summit, powered by ScanSource and Business Solutions held Aug. 11 at the Renaissance Dallas Richardson Hotel, “The Healthcare IT Guy” Shahid Shah addressed this issue and how vendors can help move their clients into an “integration age.”
Today’s Climate
According to Shah, healthcare is working its way through a period of digitization — from EHRs to revenue cycle to accounting and financial systems, the entire industry is moving toward a digital format. This leaves providers, and vendors, in a position where they have to connect all the digital pieces, something Shah believes is going to be very challenging.
Your Clients
Medical clients today have very specific needs and their focuses and goals might be completely different from the services you’re looking to offer. In Shah’s opinion, this is exactly where you should be paying attention, “Because the stuff that the doctors want to put together … they want to put together that imaging report that comes out of that MRI machine or the X-ray machine that is new to their environment. They’ve got blood pressure cuffs and they’ve got vital signs, they’ve got this, they’ve got that, and you don’t want to connect them? What are you doing in that business at all? You have to integrate in order to be successful.”
Your Job
Your job a solutions provider is to round the islands up.
The aforementioned MRI machine was its own island, as is pretty much every other piece of equipment and technology. Bringing these islands together is what makes your clients’ lives easier, and that comes through an infrastructure that allows them to modernize integration. The key to doing this though, is selling them services and devices that meet their most immediate needs. Shah said, “Re-imagining the user interfaces, taking the gunky crap stuff that they’ve been offered for years, and just slapping on a prettier interface … They’re looking, the doctors are looking for … self-service applications. Patients are looking for the ability to come to the physician’s office and answer questions on a kiosk or an iPad, rather than filling out another form.”
The Aug. 11 Smart VAR Healthcare Summit was held at the Renaissance Dallas Richardson Hotel. Smart VAR Healthcare Summits, powered by ScanSource and Business Solutions, are sponsored by: Honeywell, Datalogic, and Zebra.