A side story: I remember once being asked to implement a new system for the ER department at a small hospital system. The ER system in question didn't actually exist. It was just vaporware, and the company CEO was golf buddies with the department head of the ER. We still were asked to go through the whole planning process with this ER system that didn't actually exist before somebody higher up in the organization finally pumped the breaks...
In all seriousness though, as a hospital system gets larger there's always a push to standardize systems across departments among hospitals in a given health system. Your leverage within a department to pitch for a certain unique piece of software is inversely proportional to size of your health system. If you have less than a half-dozen hospitals, you might have a chance of getting a say in the choice. Anything larger than that, good luck. Just another reason (among many others) for state regulators to wake up from their slumber and start challenging some of these big health system mergers.
Very true, the consolidation and drive for profit has been bad for community health care, especially in rural areas where choices are few and distances much greater.
A side story: I remember once being asked to implement a new system for the ER department at a small hospital system. The ER system in question didn't actually exist. It was just vaporware, and the company CEO was golf buddies with the department head of the ER. We still were asked to go through the whole planning process with this ER system that didn't actually exist before somebody higher up in the organization finally pumped the breaks...
In all seriousness though, as a hospital system gets larger there's always a push to standardize systems across departments among hospitals in a given health system. Your leverage within a department to pitch for a certain unique piece of software is inversely proportional to size of your health system. If you have less than a half-dozen hospitals, you might have a chance of getting a say in the choice. Anything larger than that, good luck. Just another reason (among many others) for state regulators to wake up from their slumber and start challenging some of these big health system mergers.
Very true, the consolidation and drive for profit has been bad for community health care, especially in rural areas where choices are few and distances much greater.