Why consolidating and standardizing advanced visualization is not what you think.
It’s no secret that healthcare organizations need to do more with less these days. As value-based care gains momentum, so do initiatives to cut costs as well as improve operational efficiencies and clinical outcomes. From an advanced visualization perspective, many are evaluating their current infrastructure which often consists of disparate, dedicated workstations spread across radiology departments. And for multi-site organizations, advanced visualization applications are often adopted at a site level with local budgets. Even individual sites may have several different vendor systems.
The limitations of multi-vendor systems and dedicated workstations.
With each vendor system typically tied to one or more dedicated workstations rather than to an enterprise solution, clinicians are limited to finding the right workstation when they need access to its applications. Maintaining all of the disparate workstations and their related contracts is time-consuming and expensive. This not only impacts revenue, it impacts patient care quality.
Multi-vendor systems can create challenges, including:
- managing many different vendor contracts
- multiple applications with similar or duplicate functionality
- administering specific training required for each different platform
- dealing with non-standardized workflows
- incurring a higher total cost of software ownership
Single-vendor simplicity.
Consolidating and standardizing your advanced visualization systems with a single vendor has some obvious potential benefits: lower total cost of ownership, increased operational efficiencies and improved clinical outcomes.
But you might think that when you consolidate, you’ll limit access to the premier clinical applications your clinicians need. Maybe you think that changing vendors will be a complicated initiative that will disrupt your team and technology. And you might assume that it will require a large team of people to manage.
It doesn’t need to be that way.
Freedom to choose.
A single-vendor advanced visualization solution allows you to choose applications strategically on an enterprise level rather than on a site-by-site or one-off basis. You should have the freedom to choose the applications you need at launch as well as to add applications in the future.
But you should also be able to maintain access to specific solutions on your existing dedicated workstations if needed. The right vendor will simply provide you with even easier access to them, because they will be available anytime, anywhere – through an integrated solution. Consolidation and standardization benefits include:
- simplified vendor maintenance/service contract management
- streamlined user training
- consistent, repeatable workflows
You can provide your clinicians with access to the applications they need – even ones you may have previously thought you couldn’t afford – for less. You can customize applications and gain access to partner integrations of popular viewing applications and clinical tools. Your organization’s application usage rates can be analyzed, and a standardization strategy can be tailored to your needs.
When the solution offers these features, it can gain support at all organizational levels:
- customizable, scalable implementation
- flexible deployment options, including full virtualization
- vendor-neutral platform that allows access anywhere, anytime
- extensive offering of premier clinical applications and partner integrations
- fast, high-quality clinical workflows
- standardized user experience
- no upgrade charge
The bottom line.
In the end, it comes down to patient outcomes and financial impact. When you set your operational goals for standardizing enterprise imaging to include interoperability, improved efficiencies and decreased costs, you can achieve strong results. Healthcare organizations are finding that choosing a single-vendor solution can reduce support and maintenance costs, decreasing total cost of ownership. And while premier advanced visualization applications may have been too expensive in a multi-vendor implementation, consolidating with a single vendor can make them affordable.
The financial impact of standardizing advanced visualization is clear. But when your focus is on patient outcomes, the ability to leverage advanced visualization applications to find answers more quickly and easily is just as important.
Are you ready for simplicity?
No more duplicate applications.
No more myriad of vendor contracts.
No more disparate vendor workstations.
Read our eBook about standardization and consolidation, or contact us to learn more.
