eHealth Articles & White Papers

Your Resources Determine Your Direction

Ben Dillon - Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

If you are considering taking a significant step forward with your online initiatives, one of the biggest challenges is simply to determine the best way to accomplish your goals. If you've always managed your online initiatives in-house, it may seem obvious that you should continue down the same path. But that may not be the most effective approach.

When planning your online initiatives, your resources and infrastructure are two items that determine your direction. However, they are generally the most difficult items to capture and communicate in the process. That's because the resources you will need to be successful are different based on your goals and the approach you take.

How organizations tackle their online initiatives

There are three basic approaches to executing your eHealth initiatives: you can develop the initiatives in-house, outsource them or use a combination of in-house and outsourced resources.

Each year we conduct a survey to measure how organizations are executing initiatives based on these three approaches. As you can see from the chart below, the leading organizations - or those considered ahead of the pack - predominantly use a combination of in-house and outsourced resources.

There are many organizations that execute all of their initiatives in-house - either from scratch or by using off the shelf tools. They typically provide a competitive online presence, but require several staff resources to do so. Most "trailer" organizations - organizations that are behind their competitors - keep many of their initiatives in-house, but they are most likely attempting to provide a minimal presence as inexpensively as possible.

Outsourcing all online initiatives is less common than keeping all initiatives in-house. Most organizations find they need to have internal staff, at a minimum, organizing, gaining buy-in and providing accountability for their online efforts.

The preferred approach is a combined effort of in-house and outsourced resources. As organizations look to become more competitive with their online efforts, they increasingly move this direction.

Why does a combined approach make sense?

The age of having one Webmaster create and manage all aspects of a professional Web presence is long gone. As individual disciplines have matured, we've come to depend on a team of deeply skilled specialists, each focusing on a particular skill set, such as writing for the Web, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, graphic design, user interfaces, user experience, online marketing expertise or Web analytics.

Coupling these specialists with more traditional skills in the areas of business analysis and software development yields a team that can become quite large.

Building such a team can be a challenge for any single organization. Justifying its costs for in-house services is impossible for all but the largest of healthcare providers.

Conversely, outsourcing the entire process leads to a lack of control, which makes most health systems uncomfortable. There are well-established outsourcing models for discrete organization functions (such as payroll processing) or for commodity services (including commodity IT services), but online services do not yet fit into those boxes - they cross too many departmental boundaries and require participation and change from many parts of the organization to be truly successful.

The result is that most organizations choose to keep some functions in-house and call on software and other needed expertise from the outside to fill out the requisite team. Ideally, specialists can be contacted on an as-needed basis to maximize impact and manage overall costs.

Choose wisely

So you understand that value in combining both an in-house team and outside experts when needed. But knowing you need outside help from a vendor and finding the right vendor for your organization are very different.

The challenge now becomes assessing the resources you have available for your online initiatives and communicating that to the vendors you're assessing. It's important to provide vendors with as much information as possible. Offer rough guidelines for your budget tolerance if it's established. Share information about the staff that will be engaged internally and their experience and skill sets. This will ensure the vendors will recommend a solution that fits your needs and ability to deliver.

Where does the software fit in?

If you're searching for software, it's important to evaluate it on the capabilities that a particular vendor partner brings to the table. But the details of the software should be secondary to what they do with it and how well its fits with your overall goals and needs.

In other words, it is possible to do good things with mediocre software just as it is possible to do really bad things with excellent software. And yet most vendor selections are really software selections, looking only at lists of features.

Determining how a vendor will solve your problems and help you accomplish your goals is the real key. Let them tell you how they're going to accomplish that.