Are you still using a proprietary software solution for incident reporting? If so, you’re probably experiencing some of these challenges:
- Limited functionality
- Difficulty accessing historical information
- Lack of access to new features
Healthcare organizations often have access to skilled technology professionals who can develop innovative public safety incident reporting solutions. Even though these professionals have strong technical expertise, many of them don’t also have expertise in public safety.
A Reporting Software Solution Developed by a Software Vendor that Specializes in Healthcare Security
Instead of developing your own solution, consider partnering with us. When you work with a vendor like Omnigo Software, you get a solution that was designed by healthcare security professionals, for healthcare security professionals. You also get access to continuous upgrades and new features — many of which are developed as a direct response to customer feedback and recommendations.
Whether you’re upgrading from paper-and-pen reporting or considering upgrading your current software solution, there are a number of important things to consider.
The Cost
An in-house solution may offer an initial cost advantage over a vendor-provided solution. However, the additional costs related to working with such a solution could quickly eclipse the initial savings.
The Time
Using a homegrown solution, you may find your team spending many hours searching for data and historical information as well as generating reports and analytics manually.
Estimate the time allocated to manually gathering information to produce necessary reports, and multiply that by the dollar value of those hours. This is the actual cost of a process that could be automated with the right software.
Easy Customization Features
Another important consideration is whether the solution you’re choosing has easy customization features. Every organization has unique reporting needs, and those needs frequently change. If you need to add a location, incident type, or other categories, is it easy to do so?
The solution you’re considering may have many features, but is it easy enough for your least tech-savvy team member to use? Your reporting system is only as good as the information entered into it, so it’s important to be sure the solution will be utilized to its full potential by your entire team.
Other Questions you may Want to Consider Include:
- Can I review and approve reports from my team before they are submitted?
- Is it easy to log events and activities?
- Does the software have robust search capabilities to make it easy to find what we need?
- Does the solution have an open architecture, and can it integrate with my other systems?
- Does the solution offer notifications?
- Does the solution provide upgrades and new features as my industry needs change?
Your Future Needs
Finally, consider your future needs and where your organization is headed. Do you anticipate growth or expansion? Maybe you don’t have the budget or the need for mobile capabilities or features like patrol verification, property management, and lost-and-found management right now. But it’s important to consider what you might need in the future and whether the solution you choose could easily scale to meet those future needs.
Ideally, implementing a new solution will save you time, make your day-to-day operations easier, and contribute to making your healthcare community safer — now and as your organization evolves in the future.
