Question

Deciding between best of breed vendor systems and an integrated vendor system requires a strong understanding of the needs of the healthcare organization in delivering quality care to patients. You have been hired as a healthcare applications consultant by an integrated hospital system consisting of full hospital services (including radiology, laboratory, and dietary services). The hospital system has numerous sites, such as satellite ambulatory care centers for specific populations of customers. What are the advantages and disadvantages of a best-of-breed systems approach? What are the advantages and disadvantages of an integrated vendor system approach? Propose to management a recommendation for proceeding; including any assumptions required to support your recommendation. (Please type response)

Answer 1

The selection between best of breed vendor and integrated vendor system is mainly based on the needs of healthcare system, in providing quality of care,

The best of breed vendor system is like single tool to solve a one specific problem.this is a good choice for health care where they specialize on one or two functional areas such as emergencr room or quality management or inventory checking etc. whenever the healthcare system need to expand ,the requirement will multiply hence best of breed vendor systems alone cannot handle this results in the addition of another systems .in this scenerio good choice is integrated system where they handle most requiremnet at a time.

Pros and cons of best of breed vendor System:

Pros:

1. Its easier to update because the function is geared up to single purpose
2. Specialized functions has many solutions and options and provide specific knowledge regarding the specific functions
3. Updates won't effect other systems

Cons:

1. Best of breed vendors has little knowlege regarding the need for large organizations
2. integration with other system is highly complex
3. Sharing of data to other systems is difficult

Integrated vendor systems:

As healthcare consultant i strongly recommend integrated vendor systems in large hospital than best of breed.Many of the hospital settings with all full services are mainly promote integrated vendor systems. The datas stored in each specilaized areas can be easily accessible by the staffs from other areas. this will reduce the time and cost effectiveness of the organization.For eg: If a patient came to emergency room they have to share their full history the ER nurse. from there they may shift to physician room or some other department the same history collection has to be done. If the datas of patients are stored in integrated systems , its can be easily restored by each departments rather than spending time in collecting datas.

Pros:

1. The datas can be easily shared to other systems
2. They have a wide knowledge regrding various systems used in the settings
3. Time consuming
4. cost effective

Cons:

1. System update is a great deal in this
2. options and solutions are minimal because wide variety of functions are carried out.