The Big Hospital-Small Hospital Divide

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.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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