How to introduce SaaS in your Healthcare Business – by Hanish Bansal

SaaS is a very important asset when it comes to healthcare organisations. It can significantly reduce the workload from regular tasks and help you shift your focus towards more important projects, explains Hanish Bansal in this post that highlights the benefits of SaaS in healthcare.

Healthcare is one of the most important sectors of society. However, this sector often faces various issues and can be extremely costly at times. To overcome this, many healthcare businesses are looking forward to introducing SaaS or Software-as-a-Service in their business models. SaaS is essentially a business model based on cloud computing which helps the customers receive a complete package of the applications of the vendor through the internet if they subscribe to the service. This software tends to be on the cloud so this removes the need of installing it on any servers or computers, making it more manageable. The vendor of the SaaS will further be responsible for the upgradation, security, infrastructure and overall management of the product.

Benefits and challenges of introducing SaaS in the healthcare business

While introducing SaaS can be highly beneficial for many healthcare organisations, it also poses some challenges in front of you. Therefore, it is important to estimate everything accurately beforehand so that your organisation can make the most out of SaaS. Some benefits of introducing SaaS in the healthcare business are:

• Cost-efficient: SaaS integration can make your organisation highly cost-efficient since it can improve the deployment of any EMRs (Electronic Media Records) and EHRs (Electronic Health Records).
  
• Less investment: There is significantly less upfront investment while you invest in SaaS because you get access to the IT services that you need without completely developing them on your own.
  
• Easy sharing: Sharing data between hospitals and between insurance providers can become simpler by the deployment of SaaS.
  
• Better use of resources: Since you’re not using your own IT resources or developing something from scratch yourself, SaaS saves you from spending IT resources for the basic functions of your healthcare organisation. Then, you can invest your IT resources in some other strategic projects that can help.
  
• Integration: SaaS introduction will also allow you to integrate well with regional healthcare provides, insurance companies and other such organisations that might require data from you.

However, SaaS can also pose some challenges which you must address before implementing it in your organisation. Some challenges include:

• Data security: Since the data that you have is sensitive, it must be safeguarded when it is stored on the cloud. For this, the SaaS vendor must guarantee that their solution provides proper security to your organisation and its patients.

• Data privacy: To ensure that the organisation’s sensitive data is in your hands and doesn’t get leaked, it is important to protect the data. This can be done by controlling the data access, which needs to be worked upon by the healthcare organisation and the vendor.
  
• Regulations: Healthcare is a sector that is bound by various rules and there is a requirement of ensuring that proper care is taken to follow these rules. Therefore, the SaaS vendor must be aware of these and look into them to ensure that he complies with all the set regulations.

Introduction Strategy for SaaS for Healthcare Business

SaaS is a very important asset when it comes to healthcare organisations. It can significantly reduce the workload from regular tasks and help you shift your focus towards more important projects and can thereby help improve the growth of your healthcare business. Many healthcare consultants have sworn on the efficacy of SaaS in businesses. Some of them even predict that SaaS is going to take the healthcare industry by storm. Some major strategies that need to be adopted in your healthcare business to introduce SaaS are:

• Analysis of need: One of the most important things to keep in mind while beginning with incorporating SaaS in your healthcare business is analysing whether or not SaaS will fit well into your system. For this, you have to find out if SaaS is the right model to help your company grow.
  
• Gain clarity: Further, it is important to gain proper clarity on your business. For this, you need to define what your business requirements are, both functional and non-functional and then align them based on what requirement do you want SaaS to accomplish for you.
  
• Develop necessary equipment: Healthcare consultants have said that many businesses get SaaS wrong when they don’t develop the proper infrastructure to incorporate SaaS in their organisation before introducing it. To avoid making this mistake, it is important to build the necessary architecture, infrastructure, delivery excellence and QA parameters that will help you measure if your SaaS adoption has been successful or not.
  
• Find risks: One of the biggest things to include before adopting SaaS is to measure out all the potential risks that can occur, be it process-related, technical or business-related. You must identify all the risks that this introduction can bring in and theory implement steps to mitigate these risks.

Important aspects to include in your SaaS for your Healthcare Business

While designing SaaS for your Healthcare Business, it is important to ensure that you’re focusing on certain aspects that shape it. To be able to properly analyse your architectural requirements from a SaaS, it is important to get advice from a SaaS vendor who has previously dealt with healthcare businesses and  Healthcare Marketing since they can enlighten you about the various things that might come into use along the way. Some of the major architectural requirements include:

• Interface: Your SaaS must have an interface that is easy to use even by those who don’t have much knowledge about such systems.
  
• BSS or Business Support Services: BSS is a concept essentially from the telecommunication industry which is now used in various other industries and thier IT systems as well.
  
• OSS or Operational Support Services: This concept is also similar to BSS and is incorporated in major SaaS now.
  
• Cloud component: Since SaaS is implemented based on cloud computing, it is important to have a cloud component.
  
• Quality attributes: SaaS should display all the attributes that are required by your business. For this, you need to narrow down the functional or non-functional requirements that you want your SaaS to implement.
  
• Data security and privacy requirements: In the basic architecture of every SaaS, there has to be a layer that incorporates data security and privacy to ensure that the data remains safe on the cloud.
  
• Multi-lingual services: To expand the scope of usage of any SaaS, it is crucial to bring about multi-lingual services in its implementation. Through this, many people around the world can also interact with your system based on their need.

Some major architectural design factors used by the project team include:

• User authentication to make it more secure and control access.
• Support for various mobile devices and platforms to make it more accessible
• Cloud computing-based resources sharing should be supported on the system to ensure proper sharing of data without losing or corrupting it
• Error handling and root cause analysis or RCA ability must be incorporated in the SaaS
• Ease of use of the platform is required to ensure that it can be used by everyone without hassles or need of training
• The system must also be stable to ensure reliability
• The system must include regular monitoring of events and comprehensive logging to retain access to all the data flow.

SaaS is very important incorporation in healthcare businesses to ensure that they can be more productive and also increase efficiency. By implementing such a system, the healthcare sector can be improved significantly and it can lead to better results and improvement.

About the author

HANISH BANSAL, Founder & CEO, ComHes

LinkedIn: Hanish Bansal

Hanish Bansal has 25 years of experience in healthcare, with expertise in scaling hospital revenue, sales, and branches, Hanish Bansal brings both old school and new age digital marketing strategy to the table.

ComHes is an India-based healthcare consultancy and marketing firm that provides integrated healthcare solutions for hospitals, clinics, or any other healthcare practice.