Smart VAR Panel: Addressing Pain Points Gets Healthcare IT Clients' Attention
By Megan Williams, contributing writer
Your healthcare IT clients won’t sign on for your technology solutions unless you’re actively connecting with their needs. At the Smart VAR Healthcare Summit, powered by ScanSource and Business Solutions held Aug. 11 at the Renaissance Dallas Richardson Hotel, a panel of healthcare end users emphasized this principle.
Understanding Pain Points
Your clients’ buying decisions pivot on pain points. Some of these are solved by technology, and some are caused by it. When approaching a client, it’s incredibly important to understand what’s most pressing for them and to ask that in direct ways.
Panelist Dr. Trisha Swift, a healthcare management consultant for Kurt Salmon and end user Doctor of Nursing Practice for 15 years, addressed this topic by reflecting on her own experiences and emphasizing the importance of integrating services. She was careful to stress the fact that decision-makers are housed in clinical operations — they’re the users and they’re the ones who’ll be sending bills to the IT department to be paid.
“They’re the ones with the big budget, but we’re going to use it. We need to be able to understand the limitations of the product, know how it’s solving the issues that are being faced to clinicians every day,” Swift said.
“One of the biggest pain points, when vendors approach facilities, is that they tend to get a little beyond their scope. Their scope of expertise is in the product and the sophistication of that product. It’s not necessarily on understanding the workflows and the problems that they’re really intended to solve. Not to sound trite, but one of the biggest pain points for me is when a vendor acts as though they’re a workflow expert, and they’re not,” she commented
Making Initial Contact
Rabin Pant, director of clinical informatics at Methodist Health System offered useful advice on making contact via email — and the futility of generic messages: “One of the things I do not like, and I do not check, is generic email. When I get a generic email, I’m not paying attention. It could be the person I just talked to today, but I’m not going to check it. The question is how are you going to get my attention?” He said the answer to that question is first to understand the problem.
He went on to emphasize the importance of understanding the current state of an organization as well as repeating the theme of understanding what problems need to get solved. It’s an effort that, along with understanding the institution as a whole, will be appreciated and push you closer to the head of the pack as a potential partner.
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.