1 ADVANCE for Executive Insight

healthcare IT
By Robert “Bob” Latz, PT, DPT, CHCIO
Choosing the Right Vendor
for a Hosted Email Solution
One CIO shares his insights into selecting a cloud-based
email vendor for your organization.
In a recent survey of 97
CHIME members, just shy
of 10% are using a hosted
Microsoft Exchange environment
to meet their organizations’
email needs. However,
another 26 individuals (24%)
share that they are considering
moving to a hosted email
environment for two reasons:
1) the time spent on internal
administration and maintenance; and 2) the cost
of hardware and licensing for their environment.
Our company, Select Rehabilitation, has nearly
500 post-acute care locations in 32 states. For
many of the same reasons as the survey responders,
we are in the final stages of choosing a vendor
for a hosted email solution. Above and beyond the
cost and time considerations, we have two unique
drivers for this change: 1) We have gone through
several recent acquisitions and need to consolidate
our email in one solution; and 2) We need to be
flexible enough to incorporate near-future growth.
Known Quantity
Email is one of the low-hanging fruits in the
cloud when looking at annual cost savings.
We can remove unknown hardware costs for a
known vendor cost, and we can remove or restructure
network management costs for employee,
licenses, patches and maintenance updates,
to name a few. By moving to a cloud-based
email environment, we trade unknowable management
costs for a relatively
known monthly cost.
Email is also critical for
communication, so reliability
and uptime is necessary.
A cloud solution is a perfect
answer. But which one is right
for us?
The Risks
In follow-up discussions with
some healthcare CIOs, we learned of several
risks present in a hosted email environment:
n Security concerns, including hosting of email
offshore
n Migration of existing data
n Maintaining control of our data
As we drew together all of our needs for this
service, we paid particular attention to these
risks. We asked each vendor to clarify their operating
structure as well as their data migration
and maintenance tools.
RFP
In order to understand the ROI for our situation,
we put together an RFP and sent it out to seven
vendors — including Google and Office 365. Two
could not meet our time frame for going live or
returning the RFP. Of the remaining five, we received
pricing quotes ranging from roughly $100
to $220 per user, per year. In most cases this in-
Robert “Bob” Latz is corporate director of technology integration at Select Rehabilitation Inc. He is a member
of CHIME, completed the CIO Boot Camp, and became a Certified HealthCare CIO. He is the Secretary of the
Technology Special Interest Group of the American Physical Therapy Association and has presented on technology
related topics at APTA conferences. He is a member of the NASL (National Association for Support of
Long Term Care) Technology Committee.
Email is one of the
low-hanging fruits
in the cloud when
looking at annual
cost savings. We
can remove unknown
hardware
costs for a known
vendor cost, and
we can remove or
restructure network
management
costs for employee,
licenses,
patches and maintenance
updates.
Healthcare IT is sponsored by
the College of Health Information
Management Executives
(CHIME). Contact CHIME at
www.cio-chime.org.
12 ADVANCE for Executive Insight