The healthcare landscape is under major renovation as executives seek to re-align their value to the demands of the market and create competitive differentiators that drive up that value and drive out digital disruptors. Mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures are three of the biggest and most transformative options these executives have in their toolkit.
But all that healthcare M&A activity comes down to simple – or not so simple – IT integration that you must execute upon. This blog post will outline WHY you have to consider M&As in your IT roadmap and lay out some best practices for managing the healthcare IT M&A integration as well as where to go to get more details.
How Healthcare M&As are transforming Healthcare IT
In March of this year, UPS announced their entrance into the healthcare space – yes, United Postal Service. Say what?!
UPS has been providing supply chain management to the healthcare industry for years – shipping samples to laboratories and supplies to hospitals. But now the shipping giant wants to move beyond labs, hospitals and even your home doorstep to provide in-home health services.1
All of this is in response to Amazon, which announced the acquisition of PillPack, an online pharmacy organization, in July 2018.
“Amazon.com Inc. is buying its way into the heart of the U.S. health-care system, instantly shaking up a prescription-drug industry already in the midst of a broader transformation.”2
On top of digital giant disruptors changing the healthcare landscape, also consider the fickle hand of politics and healthcare laws impacting the way existing organization do business. All of these changes are driving healthcare M&A activity.
That means healthcare IT is changing.
According to Gartner, “Digital capabilities of an enterprise will become a growing factor in the valuation of health entities in joint venture, partnership and M&A activity. Digital capability is a vital differentiating and enabling capability that will transform business models, such as care delivery, health plan design/administration, medical devices/drugs and human capital.”3
Best Practices for IT Integration in a Healthcare M&A
Your healthcare executives are looking to IT to help deliver more value, stay relevant, and disrupt the industry. But IT integration comes with tight timelines, equally tight budgets, stringent requirements for uptime, multiple compliance mandates, a dynamic user base, and the complexity of migrating a wide variety of proprietary systems and aging infrastructure.
If you were asked to rate your pain using the Wong-Baker FACES Pain Rating Scale4, you’d probably select the face at the far right with the weepy eyes (the really bad one).
These challenges can feel overwhelming. But with the right planning and the right tools, they don’t have to be. In fact, a migration necessitated by a healthcare M&A is a prime opportunity to consolidate, clean up and modernize your hybrid Active Directory (AD), Exchange, SharePoint and Office 365 environments to support and even drive the ongoing success of your healthcare organization.
To achieve an efficient, manageable and flexible end result, IT must carefully manage the interaction before, during and after the M&A process. To help, Quest has developed an M&A IT integration checklist for healthcare organizations. It involves the following:
- Day 0: Due Diligence
- Day 1: Integration Execution
- Day 2: Ongoing Management
Read the whitepaper entitled : IT Integration Best Practices for HealthCare Mergers and Acquisitions to learn about the best practices for each of these phases.
The most important aspect of a healthcare M&A IT integration project is to build out a repeatable framework across those three phases. A comprehensive framework will give your organization the repeatable processes, tools and partners you need to reduce the learning curve of performing an M&A and learning new tools, which reduces the pressure on those tight timelines. Each M&A is different, and yet the methodology shouldn’t be recreated for each. Your chance of success for an M&A is higher when you put in processes that are repeatable.
Dig into the best practices for IT integration across each phase of a healthcare M&A and learn how a repeatable process can move your pain scale selection from the far right (weepy face) to somewhere on the left within the tolerable range (because no one can totally make the pain of an M&A disappear completely).
