Key Takeaways:
Building Your Own Platform: Requires significant investment in technical resources, compliance measures, and ongoing maintenance. Involves handling all technical details, provisioning and hosting, hiring and training staff, and managing hidden costs and compliance risks.
Challenges of Self-Building: Slow time to market, high development costs, compliance and security risks, minimal initial features, and substantial knowledge gaps in healthcare engagement.
Partnering with Dialog Health: Offers an expert-driven, ready-to-use solution with quick setup, reducing time to market and allowing for immediate patient engagement. Provides comprehensive support, known upfront costs, and eliminates many development and compliance burdens.
Dialog Health’s Platform Benefits: Includes a user-friendly self-service web console, seamless data integration, simplified subscriber management, two-way messaging, multiple engagement options, real-time analytics, and extensive features for robust healthcare engagement.
Healthcare organizations face a critical decision: should they build their own engagement platform or partner with an existing provider like Dialog Health?
This article pits these two approaches against each other, exploring the complexities, costs, and benefits of each. Stick around to find out which one is a better deal for you!
Building Your Own Engagement Platform
Building your own healthcare engagement platform requires significant investment in technical resources, compliance measures, and ongoing maintenance.
Let’s explore the key considerations and challenges involved in creating a custom solution.
Technical Details
Building your own healthcare engagement platform requires you to handle all technical details, including development, maintenance, monitoring, and security.
This involves ensuring the application meets stringent SOC II compliance standards, which guarantees the system's security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy.
Managing these aspects internally means dedicating substantial resources to continuously monitor and update the platform to prevent security breaches and maintain compliance with industry regulations.
Provisioning and Hosting
Another critical aspect is provisioning and hosting, which includes setting up either a 10-Digit Long Code (10 DLC) or a Short Code for messaging.
This process also entails navigating the complexities of The Campaign Registry (TCR) campaign registration.
You must manage the vetting process, handle any rejections and appeals, and be aware of throughput limits that might affect your messaging capabilities.
This requires a thorough understanding of telecommunications regulations and best practices to ensure seamless operation.
Hiring and Training Staff
To support and develop your new application, you'll need to hire and train a dedicated team. This includes developers to build and maintain the platform and support staff to troubleshoot issues and assist users.
The recruitment and training process can be time-consuming and costly, especially if you're looking for professionals with experience in healthcare technology and compliance.
Hidden Costs and Fees
Building and maintaining a healthcare engagement platform can incur numerous hidden costs and fees. It's essential to estimate the time and money required accurately.
Beyond the initial development expenses, consider ongoing costs for maintenance, updates, and compliance audits. Additionally, there are carrier and carriage fees to account for, which can add up quickly.
Ensuring continuous compliance with industry regulations often requires periodic audits, adding another layer of cost and complexity.
Additional Challenges in Self-Building
Creating a custom healthcare engagement platform is fraught with numerous additional challenges that can significantly impact its success and viability.
Let’s consider some of the specific difficulties you might encounter and why partnering with an established provider can be a more advantageous route.
Slow to Market
Building a compliant application demands substantial time, resources, and investment. The development cycle for a healthcare platform can be lengthy, delaying your ability to engage with patients effectively.
In contrast, partnering with a ready-to-use solution allows you to start sending messages almost immediately, accelerating your time to market and enabling quicker impact.
High Development Costs
The cost of developing a DIY platform can escalate rapidly. Investing in custom development often diverts funds from other critical growth areas.
By partnering with an existing provider, you can allocate your resources more efficiently, focusing on expanding your reach and improving patient engagement rather than dealing with coding headaches.
Compliance and Security Risks
Navigating regulatory requirements and conducting risk assessments are complex and demanding tasks.
Partnering with experts who already offer HIPAA and SOC II compliant solutions mitigates these risks, ensuring that your platform adheres to necessary standards without the additional burden on your internal teams.
Minimal Features and Functions
Self-built platforms often start with minimal features and functions, limiting their effectiveness.
Partnering with a platform that already offers a comprehensive suite of features ensures you have access to robust, industry-proven tools that can be deployed across your enterprise quickly and efficiently.
Substantial Knowledge Gap
Engaging a healthcare audience is intricate and requires specific knowledge that typically comes with years of industry experience.
Overcoming this substantial knowledge gap internally can be challenging. Leveraging the expertise of a seasoned provider ensures your platform benefits from established best practices and a deep understanding of the healthcare sector.
Partnering with Dialog Health
Partnering with Dialog Health offers a streamlined, expert-driven approach to healthcare engagement, eliminating many of the challenges associated with building your own platform.
Here are some of the key benefits of leveraging Dialog Health's proven solutions.
Built by Experts
Dialog Health handles all technical details, including development, maintenance, monitoring, and security.
Our team ensures the platform remains SOC II compliant, providing a robust and secure environment for your engagement needs without the burden on your internal resources.
Ready to Text
With Dialog Health’s out-of-the-box platform, not only do you get healthcare expertise, you can be ready to text in just weeks. This quick setup minimizes your time to market, allowing you to maximize your impact on both revenue and engagement almost immediately.
Supported by Trained Experts
Dialog Health provides a dedicated support team to ensure you are well-trained and ready to use the platform effectively.
You also gain access to a self-service Knowledge Base and 10+ years of industry best practices, ensuring continuous support and guidance.
Included Value
Partnering with Dialog Health simplifies your investment with known, upfront costs.
There are no worries about carrier fees, carriage fees, or ongoing development and maintenance expenses, allowing you to focus on leveraging the platform to enhance your healthcare engagement efforts.
Included No Code Benefits with Dialog Health
Dialog Health's platform offers numerous no-code benefits, making it easy to manage and enhance your healthcare engagement without extensive technical expertise.
This section outlines the key features that make Dialog Health an attractive solution.
Self-Service Web Console
The user-friendly console includes robust features like Inbox, Triage, and Outbox functionalities, allowing you to manage communications efficiently and effectively without needing specialized technical skills.
Seamless Data Integration
Easily import and export data with a variety of integration options, ensuring your engagement platform works smoothly with your existing systems and workflows.
Subscription Management
Manage your subscribers effortlessly with customizable opt-in, opt-out, and keyword-based systems.
This flexibility allows you to tailor your communications to meet the specific needs and preferences of your audience.
Simplified Two-Way Messaging
Configure personalized automated replies or manually respond to messages, facilitating seamless interaction with subscribers and ensuring timely and relevant communications.
Multiple Engagement Options
Engage your audience through personalized 1-to-1 messaging, bulk messaging, or automated workflows.
This variety of options helps you to reach your subscribers in the most effective way possible.
Real-time Analytics
Gain valuable insights into message performance with real-time analytics. Interactive reports help you understand who has been reached and who has responded, enabling you to refine your engagement strategies and reduce staff workload.
Extensive Features
Benefit from a wide range of features including the DH Content Library, Tier 1 Connectivity, White Label options, and more.
Enjoy robust personalization tools, interactive subscriber history, multi-language support, mobile number failover, and many other advanced functionalities that enhance your healthcare engagement efforts.
Work with Us
To start using our HIPAA compliant texting software - contact us today.
