Healthcare application portfolio management & decommissioning: decrease costs, increase agility

This content was originally created by Galen Healthcare, now part of RLDatix.

Abstract

Healthcare delivery continues to be a dynamic market. Agility, timeliness, and flexibility enable business value. Health systems that have made significant investments to their information technology infrastructure are finding they must upgrade their technology continuously. At the same time, they are experiencing downward cost pressures generated and intensified by COVID-19. Meanwhile, mergers and acquisitions continue to increase year after year sparking more healthcare IT portfolio rationalization and complicating efforts to retain certain data. In this context, application portfolio management and decommissioning are a necessary practice to ensure that IT is properly aligned with emerging initiatives and priorities; addition to portfolio costs must be counter measured to balance cost and value.

Key Takeaways

1. Aged technology is one of the factors that impact the high cost of healthcare. Up to 70% of a health system’s IT operating investment is attributed to the applications and infrastructure that support the environment
2. Application decommissioning is critical to improving the financial posture of healthcare delivery organizations that has likely been significantly diminished by COVID-19; a simple effort of technology portfolio rationalization can reduce IT spend in any environment as much as 60% CAPEX and 30% OPEX.
3. Formulation of the risk profile of the application portfolio is linchpin to the initiative and ranks applications based on their functionality, type of information processed, and overall business value. The context of the risk assessment is to define a plan for consolidation, remediation, or elimination of the legacy applications.
4. Done right, application decommissioning can save your organization a lot of time and money that would have otherwise been spent managing legacy applications. Done wrong, you can face a lot of legal scrutiny and cybersecurity issues.