Continued Cloud Conversions Give ERP the Attention It Deserves

For many years, healthcare enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems fell lower on the priority list for hospitals and health systems compared to enterprise clinical and revenue cycle systems. But this is starting to change, and rightfully so.

ERP systems typically encompass many departments, including human resources, finance, technical, and supply chain, meaning they have a significant impact on day-to-day operations. The biggest factors of late that are boosting the visibility of ERP systems are:

• Evolving market pressures.
• Shortcomings of on-premise legacy ERP solutions.
• More healthcare ERP vendors are embracing a transition to the cloud.

This momentum, paired with real demand for cloud ERP platforms, delivery experience, and analytical tools, is creating the perfect storm to give ERP the attention it has long deserved. We’ll dig a bit more into these areas, but for a broader view, check out our recent white paper on this topic.

Market Pressures at Play

Budgets, technology and workforce/culture were big issues before COVID-19 required hospitals and health systems to become their most nimble and agile. The pandemic is spotlighting the need for change in many areas, chief among them technology that can maximize efficiencies, empower, streamline, and standardize.

The good news is new-generation ERP solutions can improve access to necessary, actionable data related to supplies, human capital, and financial management in real time from any device or location.

What Do New ERP Systems Look Like?

Upgrading to these improved ERP systems is a basic requirement for staying competitive in the evolving healthcare landscape.

Driving demand for these upgrades is the fact that many ERP healthcare vendors are committed to the cloud, specifically a software as a service (SaaS) licensing and delivery model. SaaS differs from remote hosting (where the client still owns a unique instance of the software) in that it:

• Is acquired on a subscription basis and centrally hosted.
• Typically has one instance of the application used by all customers.
• Has functionality that may be enabled or disabled, but clients use the same software code.

Additional benefits of cloud solutions include elasticity on demand, consumption-based cost and inherent disaster recovery ability. Cloud-based SaaS solutions are scalable, and there is no need for software to be installed locally in this model.

While the robust capabilities of today’s ERP cloud-based solutions are attractive, transitioning to using these systems is still a major and, oftentimes, challenging undertaking. That’s where we can help. Impact Advisors has an experienced team to lead you through a successful implementation and help manage and guide internal staff through these changes.