In the past 18 months I have seen Clients that have been on a combination of platforms, migrating to a single vendor solution. The question always comes up: Best of Breed or Standardization. Most organizations are answering by going to a full standardized platform and moving away from vendor relationships that they have had for decades. It’s a bold step and a costly one. CIO’s have to sell their senior leadership on the idea of going through a painful process, take a revenue hit and promise to come out of it better than before.
In most cases it works out very well. Actually when you breakdown your processes to get ready for a system replacement, you end up finding all sorts of “low hanging fruit.” You find out about manual workarounds, flat data extracts, holes in your interface solution and ways to improve your billing. Most of the time you are taking on an EHR to go along with the project, and find more elegant solutions for integration.
What I wonder about is how the current vendor let themselves get to a position that their client would prefer to go through a painful process full of risk, rather than renew or upgrade their existing system. Not that I don’t understand the concept of divorce, on the contrary. Sometimes you get to a point that you can’t communicate. But with all the market changes I would like to hear from those that decided to divorce their vendors for a “newer” model.
Was it primarily support issues, depth of the modules, confidence in the product or capabilities of the product in general?
