I had a conversation recently with a healthcare IT vendor. We were discussing their entry into the hospital market with their IT product. They’d already implemented with a small hospital system, but he was working on getting the same software implemented with one of the big name hospital systems. He surmised that he needed the cache of being able to mention some big name health system to give him credibility.
I actually agree with him that there’s real value to your sales organization to be able to say that a health system with a recognizable name is using your product. Very few hospital organizations want to be the first to implement an IT product.
While your salespeople certainly enjoy the benefit of a big name brand hospital implementation, that often doesn’t translate well to the broader market of smaller hospitals. A healthcare IT implementation at a large hospital system is VERY different from one at a smaller organization. The dynamics are completely different.
The irony is that the small hospital implementations don’t provide any cache in the sales process, but they probably should. If a healthcare IT software system can be successfully implemented in a small hospital, then it’s easier to scale up from there.
Maybe we should ignore the big hospital name brands and look more towards the smaller hospital systems to help us know better what IT will work in healthcare.