There are significant costs and risks associated with the building of mission-critical systems from scratch, including timelines, and long cycles and resources associated with requirements development, testing and implementation and most of all, the risk of failure to deliver. COTS products have the benefit of being proven. Even the most thoughtfully designed and developed custom products often have scalability issues, UI/UX inefficiencies, and unpredictable costs associated with unforeseen issues.
This is especially true in organ donation and transplantation, where medical complexity meets policies, rules, and legal obligations to create a complex functional matrix that can vary across a jurisdictions and touch dozens of organizations with varying IT landscapes, capacity, and needs.
A COTS shifts the burden of system maintenance, security, and upgrades on the vendor, with costs related to these updates shared between customers. In transplant, a COTS solution benefits from the reliability, lower cost, and efficiencies of industry-specific products, without losing the flexibility, customization, and capacity to integrate and share data in a siloed, diverse user landscape.