By Dean Wiech
Business managers and organizational leaders must constantly ensure that their budges are being adhered to and that purchases by the organization are considered and proven not to be a waste of money and resources. However, return on investment (ROI) for organizations is a combination of both hard and soft costs and savings, which can often be difficult to determine.
Let’s take a look in detail. The hard cost is easy to define: What is spending now versus what will be spent on a different product, solution or system or even by doing nothing.
Alternately, how is a specific solution going to allow the organization to save money in the long run? In this scenario – hard costs and savings — there is a definitive dollar figure that is able to be applied to implementing a solution.
Soft savings are a bit more difficult to factor. Soft savings are more difficult to determine and to document because they often include intangibles like time and labor saved, or stress saved by employees completing a task that takes 10 minutes versus 35 minutes. Soft savings also might be seen in improvements in customer service or in the customer experience. It is difficult to put a dollar amount on these scenarios and improvements, but they do impact a business, its success and its financial performance.
Time is money and time is life. Savings earned equates to valuable potential life-saving time, as we well can possibly improve patient care. As healthcare organizations seek ways to allow clinicians the ability to focus more on patients rather than on information technology, there are some solutions available — many that that are often overlooked that allow health IT leaders to reach their goals. Some of these technology solutions provide a direct correlation between a physician’s ability to enter an information system, retrieve or enter information and get back to focusing on patient care. Essentially, with these types of solutions, like access and identity management, physicians can get back to work more quickly and their interaction with the technology is reduced.
Because of proven soft savings, most health IT leaders are able to justify some expense related to hard dollar investment for these types of solutions. For example, access management solutions allow IT leaders the ability to automate account management processes – accessing system information, resetting passwords and ensuring proper access to proper individuals — rather than requiring hospital system admin employees to provision, delete and manage employee’s accounts. Thus, these employees can focus on more important issues and devote time to higher priorities.
In healthcare specifically, identity and access management software plays a key role in optimizing hard costs. They reduce costs by automating the user account lifecycle, allowing accounts to be quickly provisioned for clinicians or account changes to easily be made so that they have access to what they need, when they need it. Other password management solutions, such as single sign-on, further allow clinicians to easily move from room to room without needing to enter separate credentials for each application repeatedly each time they switch computers or workstations.
Therefore, when thinking of making a decision to purchase new IT solutions, healthcare leaders should keep in mind questions like, “How is this going to help me?” and “What is my return on investment?”
At the same time, healthcare’s IT leaders need to remember to keep soft dollar savings in mind alongside the hard savings measured.
Dean Wiech is managing director of Tools4ever, a global supplier of identity and access management solutions.
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