Changing the Industry and Adding Value Through Community Collaboration

Perot Systems Community Source Program Leverages Valuable Industry-Rich Intellectual Property and Best Practices for ITO Clients

The strategic use of IT and the Intellectual Property (IP) associated with it play an important role in the operations and health of today’s healthcare organization. Even with a multitude of technology vendors providing a wide variety of solutions, it is often necessary for a modern healthcare organization to augment commercial products in order to meet their needs and goals. Many of these solutions, or best practices, are applicable to other healthcare organizations.

Realizing this, several years ago, Perot Systems convened a group of its healthcare IT Outsourcing (ITO) clients and concluded that by sharing select IP, everyone would benefit. From this, the Perot Systems Community Source Program was launched. In this program, members contribute custom software components and other IP to the Community Source resource pool for use and extension by other members, subject to any applicable licensing and contractual agreements.

Since its inception, there have been more than 30 documented cases of sharing major components, resulting in significant savings for community members. A prime example is in how these Community Source tools have helped our clients respond to the trend toward consumerism, where the educated consumer has more control of their healthcare choices. The Perot Systems Content Authoring Framework (CAF)—an adaptable content management framework that allows content owners to easily manage the workflow of Web-based information—has helped our clients create award-winning Websites for less cost.

The CAF was originally constructed as part of the Perot Systems MyHospitalWebsite.com initiative, which won the eHealthcare Leadership award in 2005 and 2007 for Best Overall Internet site for Business Improvement. MyHospitalWebsite.com has been leveraged to create Websites for many of Perot Systems clients. The CAF was also extended as part of Perot Systems’ Healthcare Content Suite, a rich set of templates and components built on Perot Systems’ robust, full-featured, Web content management system, enabling users to manage their Web content without the need for expertise in Web development. Perot Systems used these tools to create Websites for large health systems (Internet plus three Intranet sites), and research institutes, as well as the redesign of Perot Systems corporate Internet Website.

As one of the leading providers of IT and business services to the healthcare market, Perot Systems has a gold mine of industry and technology specialists working with clients and software vendors to create solutions with market-wide applicability. It simply makes good business sense that as we develop new solutions that, where possible, we then contribute to our Community Source portfolio so that other clients struggling with the same issue might benefit. We will continue to monitor the needs of the healthcare community and proactively provide additional components that will bring the most value to our Community Source members.