Buying vs. Building a Healthcare Analytics Platform: 5 Key Reasons to Buy Over Build

Access to integrated data analytics is crucial for healthcare practice success, sustainability and independence. From tracking performance to improving patient care, data insights have become essential to managing a practice effectively. Many practices, however, face a key decision: should they build their own healthcare analytics platform or buy an existing solution? 

It’s natural for many practices to consider building their own proprietary analytics solution, however, its often more costly and complex than expected. The time and costs associated with building, managing, maintaining and scaling such solution add up quickly. Explore five key reasons to consider buying before you build: 

1. Security and Compliance

In healthcare, data security and compliance are non-negotiable. Building an in-house analytics platform requires your practice to take full responsibility for meeting stringent regulatory standards such as HIPAA and implementing robust measures to protect sensitive patient data. This includes ensuring that the platform is SOC 2-compliant and can withstand evolving security threats.  

Managing these requirements in-house is not only resource-intensive but also leaves your practice vulnerable to risks if even one aspect of compliance or security is overlooked. Partnering with a trusted provider like Quinsite ensures that your platform is built on a foundation of secure, compliant infrastructure. With features designed to protect patient data and meet regulatory requirements, you gain peace of mind knowing that security and compliance are handled by experts. 

2. Time to Market

Building a healthcare analytics platform from scratch takes a significant amount of time—anywhere from months to years. The process involves not only building the platform itself but also gathering requirements, testing, and deploying the final product. During this time, your practice could be missing out on key insights that would improve performance and patient care. 

When you buy a platform like Quinsite’s Comprehensive Healthcare Analytics Platform™, you gain a proven solution that’s already been developed, tested, and optimized for healthcare practices. This allows your team to bypass the lengthy and complex development process, enabling you to focus on utilizing analytics to enhance performance and patient care without the delays associated with building a platform from scratch. 

3. Cost Efficiency

Building a platform in-house may seem like a cost-saving approach, but the hidden expenses can add up quickly. Beyond the need to hire or train developers, project managers, and IT staff to build and manage the platform, there are significant overhead costs associated with servers, platforms, and other infrastructure. These costs continue to grow with the demands of maintaining and updating the platform, addressing unexpected bugs, and ensuring robust security measures. What initially seems like a budget-friendly option can quickly become an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. 

Buying a platform gives you a predictable and manageable cost structure. Instead of dealing with the uncertain expenses that come with building and maintaining a platform, you pay a subscription fee that covers ongoing support, maintenance, and upgrades. In the long term, buying is almost always more cost-effective. 

4. Scalability

A healthcare analytics platform needs to be scalable to handle increasing amounts of data as your practice grows. Building an in-house solution that scales smoothly and efficiently is a complex task. You’ll need to continuously invest in updates, performance enhancements, and infrastructure to ensure it can handle growth. 

On the other hand, a platform like Quinsite’s is designed to scale with your needs. You won’t need to worry about whether your infrastructure can keep up with your growth—scalability is built into the solution. 

5. Proven Expertise

Building your own platform requires your team to learn, adapt, and experiment, often resulting in costly mistakes or overlooked features. A platform like Quinsite’s comes pre-equipped with industry-leading functionality and years of expertise baked in, reducing risk and ensuring reliability. 

When you buy a healthcare analytics platform, you’re investing in a product that has been developed by experts with years of experience in healthcare data analytics. These platforms come with built-in knowledge of best practices, regulatory requirements, and industry standards. 

Key Questions to Consider When Making Your Decision 

As you evaluate whether to build or buy a healthcare analytics platform, it’s important to ask yourself these critical questions to ensure you make the best decision for your practice: 

Do I have the resources for custom software development in-house? 

Building a custom platform requires specialized technical expertise. If you don’t have these resources internally, will you need to hire developers or consultants to manage the project? 

Do I have the right team/expertise to do the job? 

Even with in-house resources, building a healthcare analytics platform demands deep expertise in healthcare operations, data architecture and security. Is your team equipped with the necessary knowledge to build, manage, and maintain the platform? 

Do we have the budget to build, scale, and sustain a custom platform? 

Building a data analytics platform involves significant upfront costs for development, as well as ongoing expenses for scaling, maintaining, and updating the solution to meet evolving needs. Is your practice prepared to allocate the necessary funds without compromising other critical areas of your operations?

What is the total long-term cost to develop, maintain, and support a solution in-house? 

Consider not just the initial development costs but also the long-term expenses for payroll, onboarding new staff, continuous training, and maintaining the technology. 

What is the timeline for building the platform, and can we afford delays? 

Building a platform can take months or even years, and development delays are common. Can your practice afford to wait for the solution, especially if it's critical for improving operations? 

What are the opportunity costs? 

Diverting resources to building a platform may impact other key areas of your practice. Will focusing on development take attention away from patient care or other growth initiatives? 

These questions can help you weigh the pros and cons of building vs. buying a healthcare analytics platform. Ultimately, investing in a proven solution like Quinsite’s allows your practice to avoid the pitfalls of in-house development, providing a more efficient, scalable, and cost-effective path to operational success. 

Ready to invest in data analytics? 

Contact us today to learn more about how Quinsite’s Comprehensive Healthcare Analytics Platform™ can help your practice achieve its goals without the headaches of building from scratch.