Should You Build or Buy Wellness Technology?

Technology can be a key competitive advantage for any wellness company. Here are 4 guidelines and a white paper to help you decide if you should build your own, buy a market-ready solution or outsource.

Technology dictates a company’s efficiency but more importantly, it is a major influencer in your customer’s buy process.

In just 50 years, technology has changed the world and the pace is increasing exponentially. A smart phone today has more computing power than all of NASA did 45 years ago when it put two astronauts on the moon. Just think, smartphones hadn’t reached mass market appeal until 10 short years ago!

When it is time to replace your corporate wellness technology or introduce a new business or product line, there are three primary choices for software. You can build your own using your own internal resources, build your own using external resources (outsourcing) or buy a pre-existing software package.

DECIDING TO BUILD, BUY OR OUTSOURCE WELLNESS TECHNOLOGY IS NOT AN EASY DECISION

Working with technology and technical people can be a major challenge for most wellness companies. Without an Information Technology (IT) background, it is hard to know whether there is a legitimate reason for wanting to buy software, develop in-house or outsource.

How can you be sure you are making the right decision?

Four Guidelines to Decide: Buy, Build or Outsource

Here are four guidelines to help you make the best possible decision.

• Determine Software Needs - Clearly document your software requirements and what business needs they will solve. Prioritize these needs as Must Have, Nice to Have, Not Required (or similar criteria scale). Once you determine what you actually need and want, you are ready for next step. To help you determine and prioritize your technology needs, download this requirements checklist you can fully edit to help you with the process.

• Evaluate Existing Software Options - Determine if there are any viable products on the market today that will meet your business needs. If so, a careful analysis of available off-the-shelf product options is the best way to start. You can use the requirements checklist you completed in the previous step to evaluate how close existing software will meet you needs.
• Assess In-House Skill-Set, Workload and Timeline - If your software needs are truly unique, you need to determine if your in-house development team/business experts have the knowledge and capacity to develop the software in-house within the required timeline. Developing software is a huge undertaking and often takes far longer than anticipated. Keep in mind that the larger and more complex the project, the lower the probability that it will be completed successfully.
• Outsource to Third-Party - If developing in-house isn't feasible, outsourcing is a reasonable option. If approached carefully, you may be able to find a provider who has domain expertise and the resources to scale up quickly.

There are pros and cons to each option and if not clearly understood by all can be very costly both upfront and over the long-term. It is not uncommon to hear about a large organization that has lost millions after pulling the plug on a software development project, developed internally or outsourced. Read the white paper to understand all the pros and cons.

Download Build vs. Buy Whitepaper

Test Drive A Flexible Solution

The ideal solution would be to test-drive your envisioned solution before you make a significant investment to reduce risk.

CoreHealth can quickly configure it's corporate wellness technology to meet your specifications allowing you to test-drive with actual clients before you commit. If you love the solution as-is, you can carry on using it long-term and avoid the whole debate altogether.

Discover the wellness providers we currently help. 

About CoreHealth Technologies

CoreHealth Technologies Inc. is the leading corporate wellness platform trusted by more than 1000 organizations, ranging from medium-sized businesses to Fortune 500 enterprises. At CoreHealth, we believe that developing the best employee wellness programs is all about giving wellness companies the right code, design and access to the latest innovations. With the most customization, integrations and reliability of any software in its class, CoreHealth’s powerful platform lets users focus on growing great companies. For more information, visit corehealth.global.