Apps: OnePartner ECO

The fundamental process for selecting an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system is little different today than decades ago.

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Every element of the physician’s day drives a focus on the importance of time and physicians contend with the conflicting demands of maximizing patient communication, minimizing documentation/follow up time to the point where business and private life are joined.

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I’ve worked in many industries, chemicals, plastics, information technology, steel, transportation, software development and professional datacenters – none of these industries demand additional time the way the healthcare industry does. Where other industry managers meet during work hours, physicians typically schedule meetings after hours to avoid patient scheduling impact.

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As a result, there’s little time to devote to thorough due diligence in the selection of EMR software.

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Since the advent of EMR software, the fundamental process for buying and selling it haven’t changed in any substantial way.

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So I came up with one.

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Where healthcare information systems had always been a mishmash of disparate and often incompatible applications and hardware…

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I standardized architecture.

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Where connections with laboratory, referral partners and hospitals were an afterthought by EMR vendors…

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I included powerful connecting applications to form an “ecosystem”.

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Where pricing variation between EMR vendors was complex, confusing and required weeks of negotiations, Requests For Quotes (RFQ), evaluations and several iterations which still resulted in “apple and orange” comparisons…

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I negotiated pricing with five different EMR vendors and created a simple “oranges to oranges” comparison and gave physicians a single page price comparison no one had considered before. I transformed a selection process that required six months or longer and produced an incomplete understanding into a process where I handed physicians a single page that allowed selection of candidate systems in minutes.

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Where each physician organization was required to negotiate at great disadvantage with EMR vendors…

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I gave them “3S3P”, the “Single Simple Subscription Price Per Physician” – a monthly rate that combined the costs of disparate applications, operating systems, hardware, interfaces, datacenter and telecommunications into a single monthly rate. Then I gave them an opportunity to reduce this monthly expense as more subscribers from other organizations enrolled. I dubbed this process, the “Cooperative 3S3P decline”.

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I developed “OnePartner ECO” as an “ecosystem” that included all the critical elements of a robust EMR deployment. I envisioned sales collateral and web site materials that would draw from the natural world – our surrounding ecosystem.

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Business model

I’m a whiz with Excel. I created a spreadsheet that integrated the different pricing and volume discount models for five EMR vendors, along with the physician-block pricing of the interface engine, operating system, terminal server applications, hardware, network devices, datacenter and telecommunications expenses – AND THEN, I projected the declining subscription costs for additional physician enrollment with a five year model.

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I designed the spreadsheet so I could easily change projection parameters of enrollment pace, average number of physicians per account, etc and outline the resulting margins for the next five years. That spreadsheet is the source of the single page physician rate sheet and the critically important declining 3S3P curve – all of that attention to detail to produce something simple from one of the most complex business architectures I’ve seen.

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Web

I contracted my good friend, Gina Galetti (then with a company called BCTI) to develop the site. The result was one of the nicest and most effective web sites I’ve ever seen (see image below). I really fell in love with Gina’s design.

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Collateral

Gina Galetti also designed the sales collateral folder for OnePartner ECO. My good friend Myra Danehy designed a terrific logo. I developed a tremendous amount of product data with two stunningly effective whitepapers. Where some marketers rely on little or no hard data and hide it with amorphous statements, I dove deeply into the collection of detailed competitive solution pricing – to the point where I developed three different competing architectures with actual pricing quotes for the systems required to support them.

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“OnePartner ECO: Value Proposition Contrasted with Traditional Deployment” whitepaper

“OnePartner ECO: Pricing Contrasted with Traditional Deployment” whitepaper

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Presentation and field sales

I developed a presentation designed to communicate clearly and succinctly and in the first field test, our lab partner said it was one of the most professional sales jobs he’d ever seen. I really enjoy being “on stage” in front of a prospect. The back and forth of listening, anticipating and subtly guiding the discussion is really energizing.