There’s growing recognition that you and your IT teams now play a more integral role than ever in evaluating healthcare software and equipment purchases. What was once primarily the domain of clinical teams has evolved into a collaborative effort, largely driven by increasing technological complexity and the need for interconnectivity.
As your teams take on a more influential role in pre-purchase decision-making, you can more quickly and vocally identify challenges that will arise during implementation. One of the most significant ways to navigate those challenges? Vendor collaboration. Across the industry, IT professionals like you have indicated a need for more dedicated healthcare vendor points of contact, along with clear, structured information on security certifications, data storage practices and cost transparency.
While vendors certainly have an opportunity to step up in these areas, you also have a role to play. By bringing the right resources and clarity to the table, you can help foster stronger, more productive partnerships. Let’s explore how.
1. The right people, right away
Strengthen collaboration between your vendors and your team by involving the right people from the very beginning. For software and equipment assessments, you should bring key stakeholders to the table with you, such as PACS administrators, EMR and the clinical team, early in the process. This helps avoid backtracking or catching people up on the process, ensuring that everyone is using their time wisely in moving the project forward.
Beyond efficiency, team buy-in early on also fosters a sense of inclusion between departments in your organization. This is especially true of your IT teams, who are often brought in at the last minute to solve critical issues without getting a say in the first place.
Why this matters: Establishing those connections upfront promotes alignment, simplifies decision-making, and ultimately benefits the entire operation. For example, if cybersecurity isn’t addressed at the first meeting, vendors often have to redo documentation requests weeks later, slowing approval while security teams hunt for details such as encryption standards, MFA requirements, or cloud hosting regions.
2. Determining the destination
To pursue a goal together, you need to understand where you’re all going. Specifically, what does success look like? You may be focused on the data or other system integrations, but it’s important to make sure that other team members share the end goal. This specifically means the clinical team and administration.
Why this matters: Ultimately, it’s about achieving a quality implementation in your desired timeline. Despite the different roles you play across the healthcare system and your unique priorities—cost, functionality, interoperability, security, etc.—having a shared, clear picture of a successful implementation for your organization is critical to staying on the same page and on schedule.
3. Laying out the roadmap
Every successful partnership relies on a clear understanding of the parameters and processes required to reach the end goal. Here’s how you can get organized in this phase:
- Start by identifying any relevant protocols you need to follow—such as HL7, FHIR and DICOM—and stick to them. The last thing you want to do is start by stepping on toes or being disorganized at the outset.
- Next, you’ll need to determine compliance regulations—such as verifying ISO certifications or SOC 2 certifications, or confirming whether a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) is required.
- Beyond compliance, get clarification on who the key stakeholders and decision makers are and confirm how involved they should be in the process, and when. For instance, if the imaging director needs to approve workflow changes or you need to approve infrastructure design, all stakeholders need to be worked into the timeline of implementation.
- Simplify as much as possible along the way. Now is the time to ensure that the workflow is built to succeed long term. Making operations as automated, digital, and repeatable as possible will help with future protocols.
Why this matters: The implementation process can be complicated, but having a vendor who can work with you to make the process move forward efficiently is key. In addition, building it into your system gives you an opportunity to future-proof your investment. In the future, all ultrasound care areas will have automated digital workflows. It will save time and improve accuracy, so a new system implementation is the perfect time to set yourself up for long-term success.
4. Smooth onboarding
The collaboration doesn’t stop at the assessment or the purchase. In fact, a vendor like GE HealthCare can help your team immensely in this process by going beyond the assessment to help with training and implementation of the system.
At this point, a dedicated project manager becomes an integral part of the team. A GE HealthCare project manager can, for example, coordinate mapping ultrasound device IDs across your enterprise, ensuring they correctly flow into PACS and EMR systems. They work closely with your clinical champion and bring in technical experts to troubleshoot and help to resolve any challenges during implementation—keeping the momentum of your projects on track.
Another key indicator of success across the board is not to disrupt existing workflows. Inertia is a powerful thing, so if the implementation process requires as little change or adaptation as possible, it will benefit the entire organization.
Why this matters: This project manager serves as a central liaison, guiding and even taking the lead on communication between internal and external teams, accounting for specific IT resources and ensuring the product reaches the clinical team as efficiently as possible.
5. Training for success
To support a smooth onboarding experience, GE HealthCare provides personalized virtual training. If additional guidance is needed, they partner closely with your clinical users and your IT team to ensure you feel confident and supported throughout the transition. A range of educational resources—including how-to videos and training presentations—is also readily available, empowering users with the tools they need to succeed independently.
Why this matters: When all teams are aligned, trained and organized, the benefits ripple across the organization.
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GE HealthCare partners closely with both your clinical and IT teams to help provide smooth implementation of ultrasound workflow solutions like Verisound™ Digital & AI Solutions, their suite of digital and AI-powered technologies. Verisound Digital and AI Ultrasound Solutions is a portfolio of connectivity, collaboration, and AI-powered solutions that make ultrasound work more effectively for you, so you can work more effectively for your patients.
By working together with GE HealthCare toward a common goal in system assessment and implementation, the results can be powerful. You can achieve a more effective rollout in the short term, plus improvements to clinical workflows, which can benefit your system for years to come. All of these points lead to the ultimate goal of better patient care. Connect with a GE HealthCare team member today to talk about how they can help with software and equipment implementation.
The post Collaboration at a crossroads: 5 ways clinicians and IT teams can work better with vendors appeared first on Becker's Hospital Review | Healthcare News & Analysis.
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