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Getting Ready for the Meaningful Use EHR - Assessing your vendor management skillset

Author: Elyse, PMP, CPHIMS
September 21, 2009

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I'm sure you are one of those individuals who has bought a car in their lifetime, maybe more than one car. Did you get a deal? I wonder who gets the better deal, the car salesmen whose profession is to sell cars all day long or myself whose profession is to manage all day long. It will be like this with the meaningful use implementations. Everyone is going to be running the race, so before you begin the race. Let's talk about obstacles for the race pertaining to vendor management.

First consideration is that the clinic down the road and your self will be running the same race, although you may not be from the same starting place. Everyone will need to have it all in to qualify. So there will be a team between the physicians, the business process owners, the techies over in IT, and the Vendors.
The Resource Stool for Meaningful Use
Here is where it becomes interesting, in your IT shop, how much is outsourced? How much does the organization rely upon consultants? How is your contracting process? Do contracts have a positive supportive tone? Who is good with managing vendors within your organization?

Let's examine some brutal facts from past projects and contracts, and assign a warning flag
  • Red Flag - No internal partnering for contracting. No legal expertise for software solution contracting as a part of your legal team. No roles dedicated to contracting. The attitude is just to make sure any court dealings are local in the contract. If this is the common solution, and questions are to why does contracting take so long, then your organization earns a red flag on this risk. Commonly in this scenario most contracts are very favorable to the vendor only.
  • Yellow Flag - Under our yellow flag, contracts are vetted, but past projects have not had good outcomes. The contract was either fully way to "hard-lined" or fully to the extreme of "soft-cooperation".
  • Green Flag - In this item, contracts are fully vetted considering resource needs and timelines, the implementation may be "hard-lined" with pentalities or rewards for a speedy outcome. On the continuing operational perspective monthly vendor management meetings are established along with rules of engagement. Service levels have been agreed to from the business process owners. Partnership based vendors, consultants or outsources have a single point of contact within the organization to do business

Depending on your risk level, you may want to have a couple senior staff members experience in outsourcing and vendor management on your staff. It may be better to bring in the skill set then wait for it to be grown.

After all, those of us who know how to implement these systems will be scare given the demand. Everyone will be competing for the skilled resources and those bigger performing vendor players may just give the best resources to their best performing accounts.

Further Readings on the Getting Ready for the Meaningful Use EHR Series:

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