For health system IT leaders, deciding whether to fire a vendor rarely comes down to reading a service-level agreement dashboard. It comes down to a harder question: whether the relationship, as it stands today, is one they would enter into again.
Christian Lindmark, chief technology officer of Palo Alto, Calif.-based Stanford Health Care, said that question is the cleanest way he has found to cut through the sunk-cost thinking that can keep a failing vendor relationship alive well past the point it should have ended.
“The simplest test when weighing whether to cut ties or ride it out is this,” he told Becker’s. “If the vendor pitched you today, with their current track record disclosed upfront, would you sign? If not, the time left on the contract isn’t an asset. It’s a tax you’re paying to delay a decision you’ve already made.”
Mr. Lindmark has applied that test before, including in a case where the breaking point wasn’t a single outage but a pattern of them, each traced to a different root cause: a bad deploy, then a database failover bug, then a third-party dependency issue.
“That told us this wasn’t one bad component, but a systemic gap in how the vendor built and shipped software,” he said. “Systemic problems resolve on the vendor’s timeline, not yours.”
Stanford Health Care set a formal remediation window tied to specific metrics but began evaluating alternatives in parallel from Day 1, Mr. Lindmark said, rather than waiting to see whether remediation would fail. When the pattern didn’t break, the health system moved to early termination — a call driven less by the SLA dashboard than by what he called the “blast radius” of the failures.
“Outages touching clinical workflows carried liability and patient safety risk no remaining contract value justified absorbing,” Mr. Lindmark said.
Even with a clear-cut case for termination, he said, IT leaders tend to underweight one cost: change management. Switching vendors means retraining staff, rebuilding workflows and absorbing a temporary drop in productivity “while people relearn a system under real pressure” — a cost that’s real “even when the vendor was clearly failing,” he said, and one that deserves its own timeline and communication plan.
Chris Paravate, executive vice president and chief digital and information officer of Northeast Georgia Health System in Gainesville, Ga., said his test comes earlier: an honest self-assessment of whether the problem is fixable at all.
“Have an open mind when meeting with the vendor and connect with the executive team quickly,” he said. “Clearly state the problems and ask for their help to improve the performance. You will find out quickly if this is something in your control to fix the problems.”
But that window closes fast if there’s no real intention to repair the relationship, Mr. Paravate said.
“If you have no intention of making it work or you already have plans for replacement, just be straight and seek to terminate,” he said. “You can negotiate your contractual obligations. There is value in not wasting time.”
He added that CIOs shouldn’t expect every vendor exit to end cleanly. “You won’t always get the outcome you want — don’t waste time,” he said. “You are measured on outcomes — keep moving.”
For Luis Taveras, PhD, executive vice president and chief digital and information officer of Philadelphia-based Jefferson Health, the calculus ultimately resolves into the same conclusion Mr. Lindmark’s test is built to reach faster: Once trust, performance or alignment can’t be restored, prolonging the relationship rarely helps either side.
“In most cases, delaying a difficult decision only extends frustration, consumes valuable time and resources, and makes the eventual separation more complicated,” Dr. Taveras said. “When handled respectfully and decisively, a clean break allows both parties to redirect their energy toward opportunities that are a better fit.”
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