Costs

Development of InfoAnywhere started in 2002 as a volunteer project and was never created to be a money-making venture. Every year over 3000 hours of maintenance, support and continued development are required for the continued operation of the system. Considering the tens-of-thousands of hours of development effort that went into this system, it is important to consider that if this system were to be designed for a for-profit commercial venture, the cost would have been absolutely prohibitive. Due to the fact that this system has been built specifically for hospices, using HPCO procedures, OHRS/MIS reporting, and CRA receipting, there is a relatively small potential-user base for the software.
This explains why there are no competitors to the InfoAnywhere software. It is not a commercially-viable software to create as its true costs and value are not affordable to any not-for-profit hospice organization.

Through dedication and belief in the hospice cause, development, support and maintenance work is done as economically as possible so that any hospice can afford the small financial contribution required to sustain the software.

Even though the system is in use by over half of Ontario hospices, it exists now as a system that has the potential to help many more organizations, staff and clients, if rolled out further across the Hospice community.

InfoAnywhere is developed and maintained by a full-time IT consulting firm: Exabit Consulting. This speaks to the high quality of service and the high-availability of service that you will receive from the InfoAnywhere system. Continued development of this system is done as time permits while Maintenance and support of the system is done as-required, which results in having to reduce our commercial client load to accommodate InfoAnywhere. Additionally, since this is a mission critical application for all hospice users, we want the data to be available and secure, which requires expensive servers and high quality internet connectivity for those servers. 

These costs add up to an amount that necessitates sharing amongst the users of the system in order for it to be properly maintained as a system that can be reliably used for years to come.  We felt that the best approach is by user whereby larger hospices will contribute more based on their larger user population (and proportionately larger benefit) and smaller hospices will contribute less.  All will benefit from this state-of-the-art system - it will become, we hope, "a tide that raises all boats" regardless of size.

We believe that InfoAnywhere will be a great tool for your organization, and do not want anyone to miss out on its benefits due to financial constraints. We recognize that hospices are not-for-profits with limited budgets and have priced the system as aggressively as possible in order to make it affordable for organizations of all sizes. Making the system too inexpensive, however, would compromise our ability to be able afford to bring you the level of support, service stability, upgrades, and product quality that you expect from a mission-critical system such as this. That being said, if the reason your organization is not able to implement InfoAnywhere is purely financial, please contact us to discuss alternative payment solutions, discounting/waiving of set-up fees, or discounts to make the system fit within your budget. .

When deciding on a price that would be sufficient to cover the costs in providing the service, while being affordable to individual organizations, we decided to approach from the view of the hospice organizations using the system.
If using the system enables a coordinator to spend another 30 minutes a day with clients (or administrator is able to save this time using the admin features of the program), that equates to 2.5 hours a week or 10 hours a month.  What is the the cost of 10 hours?  Lets choose a conservative average hourly wage of $40 per hour after benefits, holiday/sick days, payroll costs, etc.  That is at least $400 per month worth of additional time spent with clients PER STAFF.  So it would make sense then that if the system was $400 per month per coordinator, it would be a worthwhile investment.  We wanted to make the system far-cheaper than this, however, to ensure it would remain in reach of all hospices: so we made it less than 1/8th of this cost.

This fee can vary based on how the training is done, where it is done, and how long it takes the individual members to become comfortable with the system.  A reasonable estimate for this would be to budget for one full day of training at a cost of about $1000 per day plus travel expenses where applicable.  For typical estimates of how much training time is required please see the training page for details. To save costs, multiple organizations can share one training session and split the cost. Remote-training is also available for those organizations who are far from the GTA and would like to save any travel / accommodation costs. Using our remote training service, we would remotely control your computer so that we can both share the same screen at the same time and demonstrate what is happening (this screen may be connected to a projector on your side for training in a group). Additionally, we will speak over the phone (we will pay the long distance charges) so we may have a 2-way dialog and ensure that the system is well-understood. This is a great alternative for training new staff, or having a refresher for existing staff, as there is no minimum-time requirement and no travel expenses. See training page for details.

Revised: We are proud to announce, that due to more users joining the system in recent years, we have stopped charging for reasonable amounts of email or forum-based technical support service. Quick questions can be answered or problems resolved at no charge via email or forum. Phone support, time-consuming requests, training or excessive requests are billed hourly.

If your hospice is currently using a computerized database, spreadsheet, or tracking system, we may be able to extract the data from that system and import it into InfoAnywhere. Costs for this service are billed hourly, and time consumption may vary depending on the quality of data exported and the amount of data requiring import.

These costs are now EXTREMELY rare. The system is so robust already that it is rare that we do not have a feature that you may be looking for. If desired, certain parts of the program can be changed, enhanced, or entirely new components can be created for your use.  Development time for these customizations will be quoted on a case-by-case basis.   One of the benefits of a shared system like this is that if any organization pays to have part of the system modified or a new portion created, in true Hospice spirit, these enhancements will be available to all other organizations at no extra cost.  This way, the system will be constantly being improved and enhanced, and since there is no disadvantage to the one paying for the enhancement, all will benefit from its creation.

The price of the InfoAnywhere system is tailored to each individual organization based on how many users it has, what kinds of services are being provided and what kind of training/integration is needed. To get pricing information, please click here.

If you are considering InfoAnywhere for your hospice, please contact us. We would be happy to speak to you about the system, answer your questions, show you around and offer you a test account so you can explore and learn yourself. Contact us to schedule a free, no obligation consultation!.