By Patrick O’Neill, Founder and President, Redhand Advisors
When it comes to selecting a risk technology solution for your business, it’s easy to get lost in all the available features and functionalities, and lose sight of the real goal in RMIS selection — to reduce your business’ risk.
Before you get sucked into claims management workflows, dashboards and incident entry, know this: An outcomes-based approach provides immeasurable value to your organization’s endgame because the product is not only fit for purpose, but is suddenly worth the cost, time and energy expenditure it’ll take to implement.
Here are three reasons why you need to take an outcomes-based approach:
Selecting a software as a service (SaaS) system based on outcomes rather than features can benefit your business in numerous ways. Look at how it benefited Jackson Healthcare.
- It aligns your goals with the system. By defining the outcomes you want to achieve, you can more effectively evaluate: Will the system you’re considering actually help you achieve those outcomes?
Case in point: When Jackson Healthcare tasked Redhand Advisors to reevaluate their RMIS, with an eye toward potential replacement, we reviewed the organization’s current environment and interviewed key stakeholders within the organization to better understand the risk department’s goals, processes and desired outcomes. The result was a “business case first” set of recommendations that focused on innovation and process improvement (central to Jackson’s needs), versus traditional requirement gathering, which focuses on RMIS features and functions.
When organizations fail to identify the outcomes until the end of the RMIS selection process, it’s usually because they succumbed to shiny object syndrome and purchased a RMIS with features that may or may not lead the risk team to its desired outcome.
2. It provides you a more solution-centric approach. This ensures the system is evaluated in the context of how it will impact your future risk, which is ultimately what drives business success. By selecting a system that will enhance based on desired outcomes, you’re not only more likely to achieve them, you’re more likely to reduce your total cost of risk.
Case in point: Redhand Advisors’ evaluation framework went beyond a checklist of features and functions. Instead, it focused on linking the organizational outcomes to the selection criteria in order to ensure the best chance of success. This created a roadmap of the key findings and detailed the business outcomes that Jackson Healthcare wanted to achieve. Potential RMIS vendors were then asked to demonstrate how their solution would address the outcomes that Jackson Healthcare was hoping to achieve. Based on this evaluation, Jackson Healthcare decided to implement a new RMIS.
3. It’s a more flexible and adaptable approach. When selecting a system based solely on its features, you risk becoming too reliant on those features and fail to consider how they will support your processes and desired outcomes in the future, as goals change. Focusing on outcomes allows you to select a system that is more adaptable, since it can be adjusted to meet new outcomes or business requirements.
Case in point: The evaluation framework that Redhand used with Jackson Healthcare focused on how the solutions would address the desired outcomes and what would be the potential impact. During implementation of their new RMIS, we reviewed and compared the vendor’s implementation progress to the initial recommendations and roadmap created during initial phase and ultimately recommended that the organization avoid significant customization, even if it meant making changes to their current business processes. We also offered the risk management team advice on how to best use the services in the vendor’s statement of work.This approach allowed Jackson Healthcare to take advantage of best practices and process improvements that the system could offer while reducing potential implementation risks in the process.
Selecting a software as a service (SaaS) system based on outcomes rather than features can benefit your business in numerous ways. Look at how it benefited Jackson Healthcare.
By aligning your goals with the system you’ve selected, taking a solution-centric approach, and adopting a more adaptable mindset, you’re more likely to achieve your desired outcomes and drive business success long term. Taking the time to define desired outcomes and evaluate the system based on how it will help you achieve them are key.
For more information on how to select a SaaS that’s right for you, schedule an inquiry call with Redhand Advisors.