In our early days, when Cemplicity co-founder Nick Macdonald and I were working out of my garage, we’d say to people, “Give us a go and not only will you reach many more patients, we promise it will cost you less than your current PREMs process”.
It was a safe bet because we were guaranteed to save companies the costs of people printing paper forms, stuffing envelopes, buying stamps and spending hours entering results into a spreadsheet.
Recently I’ve been reflecting that some things change and others stay the same. I no longer press a button and have 3m wide door roll up to let me into my office, but our last three sales wins all had a pressing need to save money on their current approach.
Being the enthusiasts we are, we spend a lot of time talking to prospective clients about all the great ways to run a patient experience (PREMs) programme: Real time, reach everyone, ask the right questions, when to ask, how to reach people, optimising participation, getting staff engaged etc.
But our new clients, while liking the idea of an upgrade, really were motivated by saving money.
One of the greatest immediate savings for these clients is that they can stop paying traditional research companies to produce quarterly or twice-yearly reports. This approach has always concerned us because of the delay between a patient having a problem and this coming to light and that it usually only reaches a small subset of patients. This approach is also expensive due to the lack of automation.
Many of our other blogs and papers cover the evidence supporting PREMs programmes, the way we design and deliver them. But let’s not forget the economies.
