Is your software working, or are you just a hostage to a contract?
Plenty of operators know their software is not working and stay anyway, because the migration and the exit fees feel scarier than the daily pain. That fear is not an accident. For many vendors, it is the retention strategy.
Plenty of operators know, privately, that their software is not working. And they stay anyway, because the thought of the data migration and the exit fees feels scarier than the daily pain. That fear is not an accident. For many vendors, it is the retention strategy.
Lock-in is engineered, not incidental
The mechanics are well documented in healthcare software: data-export fees that scale with the volume of your own data, weak or absent contractual obligations to hand over a complete extract at termination, and penalties for using competitors' tools on data you generated (EHR Source; Paubox). The highest financial risk in the relationship usually shows up not at go-live but at renewal and exit, precisely when your leverage is lowest.
The switch is expensive by design
Industry estimates put the cost of changing systems in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, with months of operational disruption. Some of that is unavoidable. But a large share is manufactured, friction deliberately built into the contract and the data model so that leaving is painful enough to keep you paying for a tool you would otherwise replace.
Portability is a choice a vendor makes
It does not have to be this way. A vendor confident in its product can make leaving easy: month-to-month terms instead of multi-year lock-in, and data that moves in and out cleanly, a lossless migration with a signed reconciliation report, so "did everything come over" has a documented answer instead of a prayer. When your data stays portable by design, staying becomes a decision you make each month because the product earns it, not because the exit is booby-trapped.
The questions to ask before you renew
Ask your vendor two things. First: if we decided to leave, what would it cost, in dollars and in days, to get a complete, usable copy of our own data out? Second: what happens at renewal? The answers tell you whether you bought software or signed a lease on your own information.
If leaving is the expensive part, you did not buy a tool. You bought a contract that happens to include one.
Keep reading
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Behavioral Health Updates is an independent industry publication published by vProGo.