In most US health systems, hospitals and large physician practices, you’ll find information technology from a single health IT vendor. The single-vendor approach dominates the health IT market, creating IT monocultures within large healthcare organizations: all information systems from one IT firm with very few other systems or system-components in the mix. While there are obvious benefits to a single-vendor IT infrastructure, there are also downsides. It is time that we question the single-vendor mentality and diversify our health IT environments. It is time to reduce our dependence on a single IT megavendor, and to bring other information technologies, from other firms, into the organization.
US Healthcare is changing rapidly: new payment models, new care delivery models, Value- Based Care, payviders, changing competition, new technologies. Health providers need to be agile, responsive, and keep up with change. These converging forces require a new digital health approach.
Health provider organizations need to shift from a single-vendor everything-under-one- roof mentality, to a technology-diverse, interconnected set of applications, with the ability to rapidly respond to changes by phasing out old technologies and replacing them with newer, state of the art components. Move away from reliance on one single IT vendor and embrace a mix of technologies. Build a health IT ecosystem with components from multiple vendors, connected via modern interoperability tools, offering agility, a wider range of options for users, and a platform for clinical service improvement and competitiveness.
Unvendoring needs to start at the top of the organization. CIOs, CMIOs, CNIOs: lead your organization’s IT strategy by identifying the bottlenecks of your current single-vendor stack. Analytics, AI applications, User Experience, Remote Patient Monitoring, are all promising starting points for Unvendoring. CMOs, CNOs: EHRs are contributing to your clinical team’s workload and burden. Don’t accept that the current tools are the only tools. Bring innovative technologies into the organization – lead by Unvendoring.
CEOs, COOs, CFOs: The pitch is that the single vendor IT option saves you money. Do you feel like you’re getting a good deal from your mono-vendor? The only way to loosen the grip of your single IT vendor is to bring in parallel competitive solutions. Unvendor to get