Pilot-to-Enterprise Conversion
Also known as: Pilot Conversion, Scale-Up Decision
The decision point at which a limited trial deployment either becomes a funded organization-wide implementation or is discontinued.
Most clinical technology enters a health system as a pilot: one department, one site, a defined period, a limited budget, and frequently a discounted or free arrangement. The conversion decision is where the actual purchase happens.
Conversion is evaluated against different criteria than the pilot was approved on. A pilot is approved on promise; a conversion is approved on measured result, full price, integration burden at scale, and competing demand for the same money.
Pilots that succeed clinically and fail to convert are extremely common, and the usual cause is that nobody defined in advance what the pilot had to demonstrate. A pilot without a written success definition cannot be argued to have succeeded.
The second most common cause is that the pilot ran in the one department most motivated to make it work, producing a result the organization does not believe will generalize.