Thursday, September 14, 2006
Why struggle with creating your own RFP for PACS?
The art of crafting an RFP for PACS, especially one that is customized for a specific Health System, requires both the ability to match the technology to user expectations and the experienced command of the English language. It's a daunting task for all but the few of us who write RFP's for PACS and read the responses numerous times a year. Practice makes perfect.
I understand the reluctance to pay a consultant to write a customized RFP. Those are precious dollars that could be spent on that second display in the ED. So a lot of today's RFP's for PACS are being written by someone in Radiology and/or someone in Information Technology. A solid effort would require a minimum of thirty hours just to draft the document, and that assumes that the author has a sample RFP or a template to start from. No wonder there is so much interest these days in "borrowed RFP's". Just be advised that the quality of the final document and therefore the value of the responses are only as good as the template that the author starts with and his or her skills with the language.
If you ask any of the PACS vendors their opinion of today's RFP's, they will tell you how truly dreadful many of them are. The questions are poorly written, leaving so much room for interpretation that it is isn't clear what the customer is seeking. Other questions are no longer relevant because the technology is no longer in use. Still other questions are so basic that every single vendor in the market could respond with a "yes", meaning the question was not a differentiator and therefore was a complete waste of time. And nobody gains from a waste of time!
A poorly written RFP requires an enormous expenditure of valuable time on the part of the vendor, much more time than that required to respond to a well-written RFP. A poorly written RFP that the vendor has never seen before requires even more time to study and prepare a response. Given the volume of RFP's for PACS being received these days, it shouldn't surprise you to hear that the busiest vendors cannot respond to all of them. Unless vendors have good reason to believe that they have a very good chance to win the business, they have to decide which to respond to based on the quality of the RFP and the estimated amount of effort required in preparing a response. The poorly written RFP is almost always tossed in the can. That means the Health System loses an opportunity to learn about a particular system, and the value of the RFP in differentiating various solutions is diminished. A poorly written RFP doesn't confirm the best solution, it guarantees the success of the front runner, and the truly deserving competition is encouraged to drop out. You never know what you missed.
Rather than present an array of arguments in favor of using professional help to create an RFP for PACS, I decided that it was time to take a different tack. What's the point in making RFP's too tedious to answer and too expensive to afford? I decided it was time to create an inexpensive RFP generator that anyone can use to create their own very good RFP, one that any vendor will be willing to answer.
Why struggle with creating your own RFP for PACS? The most comprehensive and precisely written RFP for PACS in the industry can now be yours. Create your own RFP from an inexpensive template available from Gray Consulting. The $495 package includes Template, Instructions booklet and one-hour phone assistance. Contact me by phone or by email for more information.
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