From the August 2016 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Now, I don’t want to imply or infer that support from the vendor isn’t necessary. It is. In fact, it’s crucial. The question is, at what cost?
In an informal survey of several clients I have had over the past 30 years in the industry, none of the IT departments have ever gone back and compared their service usage against service costs. Why? A lack of time is the biggest issue, and the prevailing attitude is that you must have service anyway. While few would debate that fact, when you compare the costs of an SA against actual usage, the end user often comes out on the short end.
I had an engagement with a client a while back who was having issues with their PACS. The first thing I asked for was a copy of the service tickets. The review of these tickets showed that nearly 50 percent were level 1 calls — crucial calls — and less than 20 percent were identified as system bugs. The balance were tickets the IT department could have, and in most cases did handle, yet a vendor service ticket was generated anyway.
Now, were the 50 percent really crucial problems? Probably not. Perhaps 20 percent of these were, but as Dr. Dalai identified as the No. 1 issue in his “Laws of PACS” blog, PACS is the radiology department, and without PACS the radiology department ceases to function. It is that way with nearly every other clinical system as well. If radiologists can’t read the way they are used to reading, it becomes a serious problem, whether the cause is as simple as a workstation running slowly or as serious as the entire system going down. To radiologists, cardiologists and others whose livelihoods depend on electronic imaging systems, any slowdown is a level 1 issue.
When the service tickets were reviewed and compared against what would have been the time and material (T&M) service costs, the client actually would have been better off on a time and materials basis. Despite this, buying a full-service SA still seems to be the norm.
“As far as costs go, we never really look at how much it would have cost us on a time-and-materials basis versus having an SA. We just have never done that,“ said the IT manager of a multi-hospital facility in the Southeast. “There are things we simply feel we can’t put a price on, like being a priority customer and getting someone from the company on the phone when we need them. We can also budget our service costs this way as well. We may be able to get service cheaper, but it’s just not worth taking the risk of not knowing if we can get help when we need it.”
This confirms that customers will spend millions of dollars on a PACS, yet feel the only way they can get service they need is to get it through an SA. It is important to note that all SAs also cover software updates, which are fixes to problems that have been identified after a product has been released. These can be identified as going from version 10.5 to 10.7, for example.
