In this episode

The health IT market seems like it can’t possibly hold more vendors, and yet it continues to grow. How should health systems make sense of all the potential partners out there? Bobby Guelich is the co-founder and CEO of Elion, an independent healthcare marketplace focused on helping health systems evaluate vendors. In this episode, he provided insight into how peer organizations search for, find, and evaluate partners to discover the best fits. He discussed:

• The complexity of the health IT industry and the difficulty healthcare organizations face when evaluating solutions.
• A trend toward vendor consolidation and selection of platforms over point solutions.
• Strategies to effectively find the vendors you need.

“There’s there’s so much great tech out there these days, and it’s getting better so fast. There are a lot of challenges, but it’s exciting to see the direction new technology is going.” 

– Bobby Guelich

 

Key takeaways

Guelich’s work at Elion is focused on evaluating and comparing health IT vendors. He spoke about the challenge for health system leaders looking to effectively solve for their use cases with health IT vendors and offered strategies for doing so, based on his experience. Here are some of the major takeaways:

You haven’t imagined it – the health IT landscape really has gotten bigger and more complicated.

“Big picture, over the last ten years, the health care technology landscape has gone massively more complicated,” Guelich said. “Over the last 10-15 years, you had a ton of technologists come into the field, a huge explosion of startups. The pandemic just made the field that much more complicated, and now AI makes [evaluating your options] even more difficult.”

“It can be challenging to go to vendors’ webinars and figure out, ‘what does their product even do, am I the right customer?’ And we created Elion to help people make sense of this landscape.”

Guelich points out that “the average hospital has over 1,300 vendors they’re working with across technology and services,” and the process of starting with a problem and finding a vendor that effectively addresses it has gotten more complex.

But Guelich also notes a trend toward vendor consolidation. “I think people feel like, in the last five years and [during] the pandemic, they went out on kind of a buying spree. They brought in a whole bunch of new solutions, and now they’re kind of looking at it and saying, do we have duplication? How does this intersect with what our EHR can do? There’s definitely a feeling [we’re hearing] of…wanting to move away from point solutions or go with platforms as much as possible.”

But Guelich also notes a trend toward vendor consolidation. “I think people feel like, in the last five years and [during] the pandemic, they went out on kind of a buying spree. They brought in a whole bunch of new solutions, and now they’re kind of looking at it and saying, do we have duplication? How does this intersect with what our EHR can do? There’s definitely a feeling [we’re hearing] of…wanting to move away from point solutions or go with platforms as much as possible.”

So where should you start? By identifying the problem you want to solve.

If you’re looking at adding a new technology or vendor, Guelich recommended starting with the root problem you’d like to solve.

When presented with an example scenario of an access leader looking at solutions to solve for high call volumes, he said: “If you’re talking about long hold times, what is the reason for that? Is it because people can’t get through because of call volume, or perhaps because people can’t do what they want to do with self-service options that are available? Maybe there’s a common issue, such as a billing issue, that’s driving up call volume. Or maybe you need an intelligence solution so that you can understand why people are calling in to begin with.”

Identifying these root causes, Guelich said, can help narrow down the field of vendors significantly. In the call center scenario, the answer to these questions could be the difference between a revenue cycle solution, a conversational AI agent, or an intelligence vendor, for example.

Tips for leveling up your vendor evaluation process

Guelich offered several tips for healthcare organization leaders to make their vendor evaluation processes more effective:

• Ask to “get your users in there, playing with it” to cut through the marketing-speak and slick demos.
• Get more references than just what the vendor provides. “Can you back-channel with the folks they didn’t introduce you to…can you also speak to frontline users?” Guelich suggested.
• Make sure you have the full list of vendors to evaluate before getting too far down a “sales-driven process without holistically looking at the market,” Guelich said. “Going back to the problem, the cause, [helps ensure that] you of don’t get to the end and then realize, ‘There’s three other solutions out there that we really should have [evaluated], but we just kind of ran down the path with this one.”