Too often, hospitals focus on saving money on the purchase price of medical equipment, while overlooking many other costs beyond just purchase price required to maintain equipment for its entire life. Consider adopting a Total Cost of Ownership (“TCO”) approach to managing equipment costs to find more savings for your hospital. TCO is an approach to managing costs of various assets – in this case medical equipment – that takes into account all the costs of equipment over many years including installation, service, replacement parts, disposition, etc. Only once you have a more complete and accurate measure to know what you are truly spending, can you then identify the best opportunities to reduce costs and save.
There are a number of steps to implementing an effective TCO strategy, but it all starts with having the right information to know if your hospital is paying the best price on medical equipment.