May 15, 2017
What does a strong, dedicated development partnership look like between a healthcare provider and a healthcare IT company?
One of the largest long-term care providers in the U.S., which operates more than 200 skilled nursing homes, assisted living facilities, Alzheimer’s centers and retirement communities nationwide, realized that the off-the-shelf software bundle they were using to manage clinical care no longer aligned with their processes for caring for residents and lacked the scalability to support the volume of residents at each facility. The company found themselves having to manage their own processes based on the limitations of their legacy systems.
The provider determined they needed to develop their own proprietary suite of software applications tailored to the way they delivered care, which they provide in a homelike environment that differs from more traditional long-term care settings.
But the company had very limited experience in product engineering and product life cycle management. Changing the mindsets of internal stakeholders also proved difficult and made the company less suited to developing their own technology. Additionally, the company faced the challenge of a lack of healthcare IT talent in the local market.
The company came to emids in 2008 with a clear vision of their need and the challenges hampering their ability to accomplish the projects themselves. emids responded quickly to the challenge, setting up a product engineering team to help the company with end-to-end development, rollout, support and maintenance. The challenge was not merely an issue of launching new technology for the company, but also supporting them with moving forward and staying compliant with regulations.
The relationship evolved into a strong partnership, with the two organizations embarking on a successful healthcare IT journey that has lasted for nearly a decade. The company has been able to launch products to all their facilities that successfully support their processes, from an incident management system to provide staff with a consistent process for tracking and addressing incidents among residents to the development of applications for clinical, therapy and rehab systems.
The client wanted to advance their core mission of providing resident-centered care, and through a long, fruitful partnership with emids, they have been able to break down the barriers to developing innovative technology solutions to support that mission.