Filed under: IT Services
Are you hesitating to buy that expensive heavy weight software product that has to be hosted and maintained on your own servers to consume its services, but the services provided by that product are critical to run your business effectively? If your answer is “Yes”, there is good news, it’s called Software as a Service (SaaS). SaaS is also well known as On-Demand software and ASP (Application Service Provider) hosted software with some exceptions. SaaS model of offering Software product services to the customer domain is very cost-effective for the software product vendors and thus, they can offer these services at very competitive and lower costs to the customers. Customers can access all the services they need to run their business smoothly SaaS model with a comparable level of reliability, scalability and performance as compared to actual product licensed and hosted out of their own servers. This model based software products and services are especially a boon for small and medium size businesses that require various business critical software products that are simply out of their budget range to purchase license, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM). CRM is as important as it is for big enterprises to the small and medium size businesses to compete in this global market, but it might not be feasible to purchase a full-fledge CRM product license and even if they managed to justify license costs, lot of times, the support and maintenance is just too expensive.
SaaS is a very cost-effective model that is still evolving in healthcare domain. Especially due to the nature of healthcare/medical products that has to meet FDA/ PHI/ HIPAA/ Security/ High Availability/ Stability type of regulations, policies and requirements, it becomes challenging to offer software product services using SaaS model to the customers. But good news is, healthcare product vendors can leverage recent changes that occurred in the recent decade in terms of federal regulations that streamlined healthcare IT/electronic infrastructure to be in compliance with a set of standards and guidelines for offering their software products as Software as a Service to customers without having to worrying too much about compatibility of their product services with the customers infrastructure. For instance, a product vendor might be able to offer some type of insurance claim validator as SaaS to make sure all the claims being submitted by a healthcare provider to the payers/insurance companies are valid and well formed, knowing that providers are federally required to transmit all of their electronic claims in X12 format to Insurance companies. So, there are lots of opportunities that we can continue exploiting on in healthcare domain to make quality healthcare cost-effective and affordable.
If you need more information on this topic, please feel free to email me at venkat.madip@sidglobal.net or post your questions or comments here.
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