The Submit button is clicked.

The digital touch points that happen behind the scenes at that moment, be it a patient intake form, an insurance claim, or a clinical trial document, spiderweb into a number of systems, databases, services, and potential third-party organizations.

They’re not just boxes to check—they’re the gateway to critical patient care, operational efficiency, and customer experiences that build trust in your organization.

Yet organizations across industries are caught in a frustrating tension when it comes to implementing them.

Because forms don’t exist in isolation.

On the surface, digital web forms seem simple—just fields to fill out. But pull back the curtain and you’ll discover an intricate web of data flows, integrations, and mission-critical processes that power modern operations.

And the stakes are particularly high in healthcare where form failures can impact patient care, compliance, and operations.

Maybe you’ve got thousands of PDFs. Maybe you’re building digital forms from scratch. Either way the complexity with digital web forms is unavoidable.

Each form needs to talk to multiple systems, validate data in real-time, maintain security compliance, and often communicate with external partners – all while providing a customer experience for both patients and providers that’s so good it feels invisible.

All of this begs the question: do you make a solution or do you buy one?

You can make a custom solution that perfectly fits your needs but requires significant resources to maintain, or adopt a pre-built solution that might not fully integrate with your existing systems or scale with your needs, at least not affordably.

This tension is so taut that if you plucked the rope between the two, it might snap.

Speaking at HLTH 2024 last month, Gary Wetzel offered a different perspective on the age-old “make vs. buy” debate.

Here’s the hint: Most organizations have comfortably bought or sourced elements like databases, authentication, and cloud environments.

But when it comes to digital web forms, they remain a curious outlier—often caught between inadequate off-the-shelf solutions and resource-intensive custom builds.

Wetzel suggests there’s a third path forward. Watch: