Building the vendor comparison sheet and my demo notes are basically worthless
My practice has been evaluating new patient engagement platforms for about a month. Narrowed it to six vendors, sat through six demos, most of them 45-60 minutes with a follow-up technical call after.
The plan was always to build a comparison spreadsheet at the end. Pricing, integration list, support model, contract terms. Something the partner physicians could actually look at before our decision meeting next Thursday.
I sat down today to start filling it in. Two cells in I got stuck. Vendor C and Vendor E both had per-location pricing but one of them had a per-provider rider after the third provider per location, and I can't remember which. My notes say "PPL after 3" next to one and just "tiered" next to the other. Worthless.
This is a six-figure decision over the contract term and I'm doing comparison work from chicken scratch and memory. I sat there trying to mentally rewind the demos and they're already blending. The two younger reps with the same haircut do not help.
I can email both vendors and ask. I will. But what I actually want is to know in advance which of the other forty things I half-wrote down are going to bite me three months into implementation when somebody says wait, didn't they tell us X. By then the reps will all swear they said the right thing and I won't have a way to prove otherwise.
Still chewing on a better way to run the next round of this whenever it comes.