Most of the pundits for health care IT concur that a move to electronic records and in particular, a move to a SaaS, will significantly benefit insurance companies, hospitals, and physicians.
Looking at just the most basic factors:
- Insurance companies benefit from the online connectivity of SaaS.
- Hospitals benefit from the economies of scale using standardized data and processes.
- Physicians benefit by not having to operate their own patient management and billing systems.
The business case for moving to secure, SaaS-based solutions is real and compelling. But many health care organizations and service providers hesitate to make the first move, in part because of the magnitude of the transition. Where do you start? How do you undertake the project without creating a bloated, interminably delayed IT nightmare.
The answer is, of course, relatively unique for each company and can be determined as part of an application design evaluation. But one "off-the-shelf" approach is simply to identify processes that move electronic information to paper. In most cases these processes introduce both operational overhead expense and the potential for transcription error.
Eliminating this translation step can offer that first step in the design of a SaaS for healthcare markets. Key to success is to build the application UI using modular, reusable components. Re-usability means that you can take any of your modular elements and plug them into new applications or new screens as you expand your application or services. This lets you add on additional services discretely, in a predictable way, implemented over short time scales.