Resources › Evaluation checklist
What to ask any health data management platform vendor.
Every vendor demos a match. These are the questions that separate a platform that runs operations from one that produces a view. Use them on everyone on your shortlist, including us.
How change reaches your systems
- For each of our core systems, what is the write path: a maintained connector, an API, a file, or events? At what cadence and latency?
- Does the platform send each system only what changed, or does it republish whole records?
- Does each change arrive with the evidence for why it was made?
- Can each system choose how and when to align without affecting the others?
When the match is wrong
- Show us an unmerge, live. Are cross-references retained, and does each source keep its own identifier and history?
- What happens to downstream systems that already consumed the merged identifier? Are they notified?
- Is the correction effective-dated, or is history rewritten?
Survivorship and stewardship
- Can survivorship rules be set by attribute and by source, and can stewards see every losing value and the rule that chose the winner?
- What does the stewardship queue look like at steady state, six months after go-live, for an organization our size?
- Who runs the platform after go-live: our team, yours, or a partner? What is required, and what is optional?
The model
- Are relationships (practitioner to location, contract, network, product) first-class entities, with effective dating on the relationship and not only on the record?
- How does the model absorb an entity type nobody planned for?
- If we stop using the platform, what do we keep: the cross-reference, the history, the identifiers our systems already carry?
Coexistence and operations
- Does the platform work beside the masters and core systems we already run, or does it need to replace one?
- Where is our data processed, and by whom? Is any processing offshore?
- What availability is contractual, and what does it cost?
- How quickly does the first workflow deliver value, and what has to change on day one?