Win-Win Agreements has extensive experience negotiating technology agreements for EHRs, EMRs and other healthcare technology products and services.

Get the most you can out of these agreements. You have one chance to set the rules for what will likely be a long-term relationship with your new vendor. That chance is during your negotiations. If the relationship spans many years, it is imperative to make sure it works for your business. If, for whatever reason it is not working for your business, you want to preserve as many rights as possible to change or exit the agreement as appropriate.

Typically, not enough time is allotted, nor is the strategy put into place for these complex negotiations.  Many physician groups spend time evaluating the vendors for clinical fit, but negotiation of the agreement is an afterthought. Price is typically the basis of the negotiations. However, as mentioned on our services page, price is one small part of the overall relationship picture.

Don't get caught in an agreement that does not work for you. Protect yourself from financial uncertainty, as well as other items of business, technical and clinical risk, that can present themselves now, or in the future. 

Application Service Provider (ASP); Managed Service Provider (MSP); Hosting Service: all are variations on a managed service agreement. Many physician groups choose to enter into managed service agreements for a variety of reasons. Managed service agreements make good business sense in many scenarios. However, before you enter into a managed service agreement, it is important to understand what business functions and services you are allowing a third party, your technology vendor, to undertake. More importantly, it is imperative that you take action to make your vendor accountable for the risk associated with those responsibilites, and provide a meaningful way to assure yourselves that the vendor is perfoming as expected.

Ultimately, clinical responsibility for the actions of your business rests with you. Functions and services can be sourced to your vendor, but business accountability is still yours. If a patient's personal information is compromised, you are still responsible. You must get the contractual protections you need. If your service is unavailable, you stand to lose business and the confidence of your patients.

Simply signing a vendor's managed service agreement without protecting yourself is opening your organization to undue business and financial risk. This may possibly even extend to legal risk. Don't undertake such an agreement without protecting yourself. Call us to discuss how.

Do you need help creating a solicitation for vendor proposals? Do you need help evaluating those vendors? Do you want to focus on your clinical business and let a seasoned professional drive the process under your oversight and guidance?

Win-Win Agreements can help you develop a solicitation for your healthcare technology needs. We can lead you through the time consuming process of soliciting vendor responses and putting these responses into a manageable and understandable format for your review and consideration.

Whether you want to conduct a formal Request For Proposal (RFP), or other less formalized mechanism, we can help you. With a formal RFP you can put your requirements into a standardized solicitation from which to weigh the responses. There are many benefits to this, as vendors know and understand the RFP process and can adapt their proposals to meet your needs. However, there are drawbacks to an RFP. They are time consuming, and vendors are adept at responding so that they appear to meet your qualifications. Nobody wants to be knocked out based on a written response alone. They want to make your short list and will do what is required to make sure their response complies. To that end, formal RFPs are often less than successful. Understand how you want to approach your procurement and set a strategy to meet this need. Understand that a rigorous review is required to make sure you get the best fit.

There are other ways to solicit and evaluate vendors. Win-Win Agreements can discuss with you our overall process for technology acquisition. Based on your feedback, we can manage the vendor process in the best and most efficient method for you.

Do you need help building the business case for your healthcare technology needs?

Win-Win Agreements can help you with all of your procurement needs, including creating the business justification required for technology investments. If your healthcare technology acquisition needs to go to the board of directors or any oversight committee for approval, let us help you build your business case. We can create the business and financial justification based on objective information such that your financial investment is sound.

We follow a proven overall process for the Procurment Lifecycle and are prepared to discuss with you how we can make your business case for healthcare technology successful.