In this Channel Partners TV interview, Iatric Systems VP of sales and marketing James Lich talks about why he started an indirect channel at the medtech firm.

After spending 20 years at Microsoft, Lich last year started up a partner channel for Iatric Systems, which sells healthcare IT services and solutions to around 1,300 hospitals throughout North America. He put together a third-party reseller channel to complement Iatric’s direct sales team. Iatric’s three main channel products are Haystack for patient privacy, DetectRX for hospital pharmacies and MobileLab for mobile specimen collection.

So after 30 years in the healthcare IT business, what prompted Iatric to move into the channel?

“Probably the biggest reason why we decided to build out a channel was because of costs,” Lich said. “I think anyone that knows about working in corporate America today, knows there is so much downsizing happening in the industry. And bringing on a direct salesperson is an expensive venture, not to mention the training aspect of it. Not to mention, are they going to stay or are they not going to stay?”

Iatric also took steps to make its products partner-friendly, Lich said.

“We decided to make sure that we had something that was easily skewed, easily ordered, easily implemented by a partner,” he said. “We offer the ability to not only sell the solution and make a margin on that, but we also offer the opportunity to install, implement, and train as well over time. Our solutions are EMR agnostic. They're appliances. They hang off the network.”

Discussing specific ways Iatric’s products can help MSPs and their customers, Lich used the Haystack patient privacy solution for internal threat security as an example. He said while hospitals using MSPs will likely already have cybersecurity to defend against outside threats, Haystack protects against internal security threats.

“Our solution actually is a behavior, AI-enriched behavior solution that will predict those users that are internal, that are getting into the patient record that they shouldn't see,” he said. “So this tool [Haystack] is an internal threat tool, and we're looking for partners with a cybersecurity footprint who can bring this to their customers to not only take care of external threats, but find what are the internal threats as well. When we look at what would be an ideal customer for that, we look at mid-to-large hospital systems that are leveraging an EMR.”

Iatric will send a team to MSP Summit Sept. 28-30 to find partners who serve those types of customers.

“We believe we have a solution that can augment what partners are already doing from an external threat cybersecurity perspective,” Lich said.

There’s much more in the video at the top of the page.