How to Navigate Pricing Models for Home Health and Hospice Software

Home Health software vendors have been giving you and your agency choices when it comes to price plans. Well, what’s best for your agency? Let’s find out.You can do census based pricing, user based pricing, pricing for web-based software, pricing for server based software, and on and on and on. So how do you know which pricing model fits your needs?

Let’s take a look at some of the choices you have and see if they fit your needs. There is a lot of different pricing models and they can get a little complicated (we’re not sure why), so let’s take a look at a few and do our best to analyze them.

Server Based Pricing

We tend to see this model less and less on the market as vendors are switching to the SaaS (Software as a Service) or web-based model. In the server based model you’re usually asked to invest in some expensive equipment that is installed on site at your agency. This can usually be a significant up-front cost to getting started with your software. Maybe your vendor is nice and lets you break-down the payments of your server purchase over a period of time. How generous of them, right? Well, that depends on if you think being in debt to them for your servers over an extended period of time is a good option for you. You should check the fine print, if you cancel your software subscription early you may be required to pay the balance of your server purchase. Usually, on top of the server purchase you are going to have to pay a monthly fee for use and maintenance. Not to mention you may need to hire some experienced IT people to manage your on-site servers. At Data Soft Logic, we don’t like this model. PASS.

Census Based Pricing

This seems to make sense and seems pretty straightforward. You pay your subscription based on your census numbers! Sounds like a good deal right? It might be, but there’s a few things about this model that we don’t agree with at Data Soft Logic. Let’s say your census fluctuates (we know it does) month over month. How is your vendor going to decide which census numbers to capture to base your pricing on? Hopefully they have a very transparent methodology to this so you can know that you are getting billed fairly. Also, we believe that this pricing model is counter-intuitive. The point of the software we are providing you is to increase your efficiency (so you can do more with the same amount of resources). So, we are selling you a software that should enable you to increase your census without changing your staffing. Does it make sense that we should charge you more because you increased your census? We don’t think so at Data Soft Logic. We think that you should be rewarded for increasing your census, not charged more. You get to keep your profits instead of paying a portion of it to your vendor. We don’t like this model either. PASS.

User Based Pricing

This model seems to make sense. You pay for the users you need. Out of all the conventional models, we like this one the best. An agency pays for the users they need. Now, whether or not we really agree with this model is dependent on how the vendor applies it. Are you paying per user for ALL your users? Do you have to buy licenses for your field clinicians? We know these can vary greatly over time. Does each one of them need their own user license? You can see how this can become a messy proposition. But still, we like this model the most out of the conventional options. It’s almost there, but we think we can do better.

How We Do It

At Data Soft Logic we provide our Home Health and Hospice agencies a hybrid pricing model that we think makes the MOST sense for the agency. All of our plans come with unlimited field users. You’ve been growing your census and hired more field clinicians to provide services? No problem, you don’t need to contact us. Just log-in, create your field users and they are ready to go. You have on-demand scalability for field users so that your agency can adapt to your service needs at a moments notice. Now, as far as office users go, we reward efficiency. We provide tiered office user plans. Small, medium, and large. Its that simple. The benefit of this is that if you have an amazingly efficient office staff you don’t have to pay us more when they are able to handle a larger census. You are REWARDED for growing your census, not charged more. We aren’t interested in profiting from your efficiency, we want YOU to keep those profits. If you’re interested in a relationship with a software vendor that rewards you for your increased efficiency instead of charging you more, give us a call. We’re here to help your agency maximize its profits.