| Cost Considerations |
| Is the total cost of ownership affordable for my organization? | SoftTech IMS™ is priced with healthcare institutions in mind, offering the same features as other competing six-figure systems at a fraction of their cost. Most hospitals see ROI in less than a month. |
| What are the additional costs: consultation, training, support, upgrades, etc.? | Training (2 days) and consultation are readily available. Support plans, including upgrades, are available at a variety of fixed price plans. Any customizations are quoted upfront on a case-by-case basis. |
| We are a smaller hospital; how can we make this work for our budget? | Monthly leasing plans are available to help clients tailor the purchase to their budgets. |
| Policy Audience Considerations |
| Are policy search times reduced significantly, even with large numbers of policies? | Online policy searches with SoftTech IMS™ take under one second for 5000+ policies. |
| Can we still "browse" through manuals online as well as do policy searches? | Each online policy screen has a dynamic table of contents so that viewers can browse through that policy manual as they would a paper-based manual |
| Can we add links to a policy to lead staff to other relevant policies? | SoftTech IMS™ has a "See Also" feature which allows non-technical policy authors to quickly add links to other relevant policies in the system |
| Will all staff, even at off site clinics, be able to access all policies online? | SoftTech IMS™ keeps policies in a centrally available repository, so that all staff can have immediate access to the latest, best version of each policy, and policies are no longer lost to staff turnover or local disk crashes. |
| Policy Integration Considerations |
| Can we eliminate our current silos of policies and centralize them instead? | As a web application, SoftTech IMS™ can make your Intranet and policy system available to anyone with network access, without installing any software on remote desktops. |
| Is there a way we can get all our policies online quickly? | SoftTech Health offers automated batch processing of your hospital's existing policies, so you can put them online in a fraction of the time. |
| Does the system allow us to incorporate multiple document formats? | The most popular policy formats, including Word, .txt, .rtf, and Mox files can be integrated into SoftTech IMS™. |
| Can we set it up so that policy authors can only edit their own dept's policies? | You can configure editing access to each separate manual, so that only approved authors can make changes. |
| Can we add more documents as we need to? | SoftTech IMS™ is fully scalable and designed to let your staff easily add more policies as your hospital grows. |
| Regulatory/Quality Considerations for Policies |
| Can SoftTech IMS™ make it easy to notify policy authors when policies are due for review? | The Auto-Notification feature of SoftTech IMS™ sends out automatic, customizable email notices reminding designated authors about policy manuals that due for review. |
| Can we keep an audit trail of all past versions of every document? | SoftTech IMS™ automatically preserves a snapshot of every version of each policy, complete with date, time, and approver information. |
| Can we configure workflows for automatic approval routing of each document? | Upon policy revision, SoftTech IMS's flexible approval workflows automatically send email approval notices to the designated approvers for each policy, without human intervention. |
| How does the system help us catch conflicting or overlapping policies? | The powerful and comprehensive SoftTech IMS™ Search Engine, coupled with the consolidation of policies into a single repository, make it possible to identify and review every instance – hospital-wide – of policies that refer to a specific topic. |
