Delivering Individualized data to physicians: Why would I not build this myself?
The classic build vs. buy question. As it relates to trustworthy, individualized data delivered directly to physicians, we have a strong opinion. Listen to CEO Andrew Trees explain and ask some questions of his own.
Other common questions
General
Physician-related
- How do physicians feel about peer comparison?
- How can I overcome my fear of giving physicians feedback?
- How does Agathos handle physician attribution?
- What is an example of physicians collaborating around Agathos data?
- Can individualized data improve physician satisfaction?
- What — if anything — can we do about clinical variation?
- Isn't this just another administrative cost savings tool?
- How do you incorporate physician feedback into the product?
Transcript
If you are a health system administrator hearing about Agathos for the first time, you may be asking yourself, right now even, "Why wouldn't I just build this myself?"
Well, it's not that I don't have a horse in this race, but I would respectfully ask back "Why would you build it yourself?" We often find IT teams with overwhelming backlogs of projects.
We have often seen well-intended but ultimately unsuccessful attempts at building dashboards or pure benchmarking data or other internal substitutes for Agathos that, if they were released at all, they didn't land or they landed once and fizzled out and just couldn't be sustained.
We've also measured in time the amount of times that a particular administrator told us, "Well, we're gonna build this ourselves next year," and three years later, they still haven't started, and the physician users, would-be users, were still clamoring for a feedback tool about their practice patterns.
So it's a sensitive topic, I recognize that. And mechanically, there is no reason that any health system couldn't put the hours, the expertise, the data assets that they directly hold to work towards an end like Agathos. But again, I just have to ask "why?" We have years, millions of dollars, and maybe most nuanced and importantly, thousands of physicians' impressions on our product to get all the little details of the user experience, the attribution, the actionability of the data, the edge cases that always percolate up after, and only after, a particular insight is delivered. Thousands of physician impressions, millions of dollars, years of time are behind us. And we offer to turn it on within 10 weeks of time, as soon as your team is ready to get started. That is difficult to compete with, frankly, when the goal is to start realizing savings as quickly as possible.
Now, we totally understand that there are advantages to internal development, and we try to ameliorate the disadvantages inherent with working with a third-party at every place we can. We want this to be a conversation, and the best way that we could start it is by offering to see a demonstration of our product, effectively, a fully implemented Agathos, completely complimentary, within 10 weeks of saying that you're curious. And then at that point, you're welcome to keep it on. You're also welcome to continue the dialogue of why an internal substitute might weigh favorably. But it's my strong hypothesis that once you try it on for size, you'll be happy that you went external.