Evaluating Vendor Software Like an Engineer: A Case Study Using EMR Systems

Most of us have gone through a vendor evaluation at some point — picking a SaaS tool for a team, choosing between managed services, deciding whether to build or buy. The same evaluation discipline applies outside tech, and healthcare EMR software in India is a good example of a market where the "obvious" evaluation criteria (feature checklist, UI polish) are almost never the ones that matter long-term.
The parallels to software vendor selection are pretty direct. Data portability is the EMR equivalent of avoiding vendor lock-in — if you can't export patient records in a usable, standard format, you've effectively signed a contract you can't leave. Localization is the EMR equivalent of checking whether a tool actually supports your region's compliance and tax requirements, not just a generic global feature set. And implementation cost is the EMR equivalent of hidden migration and onboarding costs that never show up in the advertised pricing tier.
The failure mode is the same one we see in tech vendor selection too: evaluating on the demo instead of the operational reality — support responsiveness, migration friction, and what happens when you need to scale to a second location or a second system integration.
aNquest+ published a fairly rigorous buying guide applying this kind of criteria specifically to the Indian EMR market — worth a read even outside healthcare, as a reference for structured vendor evaluation: EMR Software for your clinic in India.