Sales

If you're reading this page, you're probably either a new customer or a returning customer beginning the sales process with iNTERFACEWARE.

We used to have a fairly traditional sales process. You would typically speak with a salesperson who knew very little about the practical realities of healthcare integration. They would reassure you that almost anything was possible, while your technical staff sat on a large conference call trying not to look confused. In many cases, nobody left with a much better understanding of the problem.

We've moved away from that model.

We generally encourage customers not to start with large conference calls. Honest conversations are much easier one-on-one. In big meetings, half the people don't understand what's being discussed, while the other half are reluctant to admit it. The result is usually a lot of agreement and very little progress.

Healthcare integration is almost always harder than it first appears.

The integration engine is rarely the biggest challenge. The difficult part is working with the vendors you're trying to integrate. Many of them have little commercial incentive to make integration easy. Quite often they would rather keep your data inside their platform and charge substantial fees to give you access to information that your own staff entered in the first place.

That's a fairly common business model in healthcare IT.

Healthcare is also a market where many vendors try to maximize revenue from existing customers instead of competing aggressively on quality. The technology often isn't the bottleneck—the business incentives are.

Because of that, I usually recommend having several short one-on-one conversations rather than one large project kickoff meeting. You can identify the real constraints much more quickly.

Some of the questions I like to ask a CEO are:

• Do you have people who are genuinely capable of implementing and maintaining integrations?
• Are they motivated to do this work?
• Would it actually be faster and less expensive to hire an experienced integration consultant?

There are a number of consultants I've worked with over the years who can deliver excellent results very quickly.

Training internal staff isn't always the cheapest option. People move on, knowledge disappears, and you're often left maintaining complicated integration code that nobody fully understands. An experienced consultant who produces clean, maintainable work can be a much better long-term investment.

Another question worth asking is whether you really need to integrate using a vendor's official API.

Ironically, the slowest part of many projects isn't the technical implementation—it's waiting for vendors to approve access, provision accounts, enable APIs, review paperwork, and perform administrative steps they've already completed thousands of times before.

Healthcare vendors are not always known for operational efficiency.

Looking forward, I suspect we'll see many integrations bypass traditional APIs altogether. Modern automation tools can often interact with existing applications through their user interfaces with remarkable reliability. It may sound old-fashioned, but when many electronic medical record systems expose poor APIs—or charge heavily for them—automating the front end can sometimes be the faster, cheaper, and more reliable solution.

Finally, it's worth asking a broader question.

Are you trying to solve the problem with too much technology?

Many healthcare organizations have accumulated layers upon layers of software, integrations, middleware, portals, and workflows. Sometimes the biggest improvement doesn't come from adding another product. It comes from simplifying the system.

My goal isn't to sell you the most software.

My goal is to help you build the simplest solution that reliably solves your problem.