I think you were missing my sarcasm (hard to portray in type .

Of course many factors contribute to a healthcare organization’s decision to choose one vendor or another.

I’m simply suggesting that vendor salesmanship should play a much smaller role than whether the product actually does what it’s supposed to do, how easy (and costly) it will be to implement (custom interfaces, order sets), etc. Company stability should definitely play a role in purchasing decisions, but so should how a company chooses to invest its resources.

Good evaluation teams are able to separate vendor puffery from evaluating to what extent a system meets their requirements. Good evaluation teams define “good” salespeople as those that are able to provide them with timely, accurate, and honest information . Evaluation teams that allow slick salesmanship and influence peddling to cloud their evaluation of the facts are doing their organizations a disservice.

Salepeople tasked to sell poorly-interfaced crap don’t want the evaluation to focus on the product itself. Salesman who work for well-financed companies that sell poorly-interfaced crap have more tools and resources at their disposal to shift the focus.

That said, problems with implementing EMRs are too often blamed on one vendor or another (see today’s story about throwing out Cerner and replacing it with EPIC). As if EPIC is that much cheaper or easier to implement than Cerner. ANY EMR implementation is going to have many of the same challenges…

I also agree that differentiating “the best” among the leading vendor products is quite difficult – they all have some strengths and they all suck in many ways. There is no “killer app”. But as long as those who purchase systems (and their executives and boards) allow themselves to be sold with the kind of sizzle that only the largest vendors can afford, we’ll be stuck in the status quo.

And Inga, you are correct, much more goes into the sale of a product than just technology. I can think of others off the top of my head that have used in advising clients: Channel to market, Service, Pricing and Viability.