The Challenge of Managing So Many Vendors

The more I talk to CIOs, the more I realize that CIO at a hospital and health system is as much about vendor management as it is anything else. And quite frankly, those CIOs are tired and overwhelmed by all the vendor management they do. Every CIO I’ve met is looking to decrease the number of vendors they’re working with and not increase it.

In some ways it makes sense. Even if you look at the basic IT commodity items like servers, systems, storage, networking, security, single sign on, etc you’re probably looking at 14-16 vendors for most organizations. This doesn’t include all the higher end clinical systems (including the EHR) and all of the shadow IT systems that have seeped their way into departments thanks to easy to purchase and use cloud solutions.

At the higher end, I’ve heard of some health systems having 300 different systems that they had to manage. It’s a much smaller number at the lower end small, rural hospital, but it’s still a huge task for even them since they outsource almost everything. They usually can’t attract or afford long term staff to the rural hospitals.

Is it any wonder why that hospital CIO told me that “we’ve got what we need”?

I wonder if the real undercurrent of his comment was “I don’t want any more vendors to manage. I have more than enough!”

My guess is that this CIO who has “all the IT he needs” would probably have no problem looking at and implementing new features and functionality from their existing vendor. That’s a huge advantage for existing vendors as they continue to grow a bigger footprint in the hospitals where they have customers. However, are they missing out on a lot of innovations because of this approach?

At the end of the day, a CIO has to be an effective vendor manager. The better they do at this job, the better their organization will perform.

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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