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RIVERSIDE HEALTH CARE FACILITIES

HOSPITAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS
SYSTEMS ARCHITECTURE

SINGLE-VENDOR OR MULTI-VENDOR?

As the healthcare IT market matures, and hospitals everywhere are becoming highly computerized, excellent new software products are being developed by a large number of firms that specialize in different functional areas of healthcare management.

How does an individual hospital benefit from these new application software modules? Should a hospital acquire software products from a single vendor or should software products be acquired from multiple vendors. Some thoughts on this subject are presented herein by Heron Technology Corp.

			ADVANTAGE
SYSTEM CHARACTERISTIC	SINGLE-VENDOR	MULTI-VENDOR	S-V	M-V
INDUSTRY TREND	Declining	Accelerating		X
COST EFECTIVENESS	Extremely expensive. Price comparison not possible	Very competitive and price-sensitive. Best-of-Budget		X
DRIVING FORCE	Historical hardware vendors such as IBM, DEC, Unisys	Cost-conscious customers requiring functionality		X
EASE OF THIRD PARTY MODULE INTEGRATION	None. Not a design criteria. Buy from same vendor	Easy. Design criteria built in.		X
USER ABILITY TO REPLACE MODULES	None. This is not a design criteria	Easy. Software modules can be replaced at any time.		X
COST TO INTERFACE A THIRD PARTY MODULE	Horrendous! (quotes of $60K for CPI to O/R scheduling are known).	Miniscule compared to the benefits ($2K to $6K)		X
SOFTWARE SUPPLIERS	Being forced to rewrite all modules and change philosophy to survive in the future	Massive market for software products without O/S restriction		X
OPERATING SYSTEMS	Pick, OS/2, AIX, MVS, Magic, QNX, etc. "Proprietary" O/S’s	Unix, Windows NT. These are "open" O/S’s.		X
CONTRACT MANAGEMENT	Easier. All with one legal entity	Multiple contracts with multiple vendors	X
SOFTWARE FUNCTIONALITY	Limited. No user choice. Take it or leave it.	The end user can select as required to meet needs.		X
TECHNICAL SUPPORT	Easier. One vendor to call. More expensive	Deal with individual vendors. Less expensive.	X
FUTURE SOFTWARE MODULES NEEDED	Problematic. No guarantee such modules will be provided.	Always a large choice of software modules		X
IMPLEMENTATION OF INITIAL SYSTEM	Challenging. Must be done at once to replace all old systems.	Much easier. Can be spaced out over many months or even years.		X

More information on the RHCFI Implementation