Benefits of Using a Pre-Built Solution vs. Creating Your Own

We know you have choices when it comes to digital marketing acquisition tools, so thank you for trusting us to work with you. With nearly 20 HRAs to choose from, your service line marketing efforts are almost always covered by the tools we have in place.

However, we know that there are wish-list items for most organizations we work with. As former health system marketers, we know how it is: from an administrator who is questioning “why aren’t we doing more for XYZ service line?!,” to the caught-in-the-hallway conversations about the numbers dropping for the XYZ Clinic. Sometimes you may think “it would be easier to just make my OWN health risk assessments, unique to my system.” Then the reality sets in. We get it.

What does it actually take to develop an HRA? In short: a lot of expertise. When you work with Medicom Health, you get the results all of the vital areas listed, below bundled into one easy-to-implement package. While this isn’t an exhaustive list, it can better help you understand the benefits to using a partner, versus going at this alone.

Financial

Typically, full development of a custom HRA from scratch would start at around $70k if development is sent offshore and would likely increase to $90-130k for a US-based development team. This estimate doesn’t include the added cost of downstream follow-up capabilities, CRM integration, a fully-integrated management portal, and automated reporting capabilities. When you factor in all of these components, the costs can really start to add up—and that’s just for the development! The next thing you have to consider is the actual content that is going into your HRA.

Scientific Review

Giving users content that is valuable, trustworthy and accurate is the cornerstone of a world-class HRA. At Medicom Health, we employ a group of dedicated content creators who are committed to staying up-to-date on the latest in health and scientific literature.

This team:

analyzes and interprets scientific research,
works closely with subject matter experts, and
makes sure the questions asked in our HRAs get an accurate, actionable result for your consumers.

Without this dedicated attention, medical assessments would quickly become out of date—or worse, completely incorrect.

Development & Security

Our team of expert software developers not only create our tools from the ground-up, they also create an environment for secure file transfers from your HRAs to your other vendor partners. These file transfers produce reports that help meet your analytic needs and can address internal issues ASAP.

To build its own secure, properly-developed HRA, an organization would need to locate an outside group that has the appropriate team that includes: medical research staff, business analysts, user experience designers, software architects, developers, DBAs, and QA. The organization would also need to ensure that the IT group within their health system would be satisfied with the security protocols used by the outside organization. Perhaps the most critical aspect of this is keeping PHI hosted in a secure, redundant, HIPAA- and HITRUST-compliant system. Note: We have achieved HITRUST CSF® Certification, the gold standard for privacy and data security.

We imagine it would be even harder to attempt a project like this internally within the health system, unless the system has substantial internal infrastructure and available resources to dedicate to it. If your team is creating the algorithms, building the software, and performing the quality assurance checks, you are on the hook if there are issues with the HRA. At Medicom, we carry comprehensive and extensive insurance to cover the risks associated with those types of concerns. Our QA group runs over 1800 automated tests every time our software is sent out, in addition to a manual review of the HRAs.

User Interface/User Experience

A User Interface/User Experience (UI/UX) team is vital to building an HRA that works for your organization. Medicom Health’s Product Team is comprised of a group of quality assurance and UI/UX experts who ensure HRA users have an easy, enjoyable, and valuable journey through your HRAs.

This team:

monitors areas where users experience the most trouble or the greatest number of errors,
identifies areas where they can adjust phrasing, question type, or function to increase ease-of-use
makes sure readability isn’t hindering users’ ability to accurately answer questions
ensure that your internal team is able to find their way around the back-end portal with ease, including getting reports, making changes to customization, or editing follow-up plans.

Strategy

Intelligent strategy is essential when it comes to marketing your HRA and getting the biggest return on your organization’s investment. The Client Success team at Medicom is a valuable group of people with knowledge about how to make your HRAs work for you. This includes:

suggesting ways to best customize your HRAs,
offering ideas for how to train new hires working with the HRA product,
offering suggestions for best practices in promoting HRAs,
providing data analysis in the portal,
finding ways to integrate with your CRM,
developing engaging follow-up plans to encourage conversion, and
help troubleshoot issues that arise throughout your contract period.

This team is made up of former hospital marketers and client service experts who are ready to help optimize your ROI.

All of this to say, the best HRAs are the ones built and managed by teams dedicated to that core business. While it may be tempting to create them internally, one will quickly realize that the execution isn’t quite as simple as hoped.

All of this said, we understand that there may be service line needs that we don’t have covered in our currently-available HRAs. In those cases, let your Medicom Health contact know so we can review your needs and add your request to our development pipeline. Almost every development and improvement we make is client-driven. Thank you for helping make us the best in the industry!