Our recent webinar with the regional Hospital Financial Management Association (HFMA) focused on a timely topic: bending your hospital’s cost curve across the medical equipment lifecycle.
Peter Robson, CEO of Miga Solutions, and Matt Werder, CTO of Hennepin County Medical Center, described how hospital leaders can drive structural cost reduction that permanently bends the cost curve to help their organizations adapt to an uncertain future. Peter and Matt provided key insights about how hospitals can uncover long-term cost savings in their medical equipment spend. For many hospitals, this translates to $13,000 annual savings per bed, or $3.9 million for a 300-bed hospital.
Access the complete webinar recording here.
Here are three practical strategies that attendees learned for reducing medical equipment spend:
- Avoid the “good enough trap:” savings can be easily overlooked when hospitals believe the price they’ve received on medical equipment is “good enough.” Perhaps the quote fits within their budget, or it’s less than what other vendors have offered. Experience shows that additional savings can often be found by not settling for good enough.
- Enable fact-based decisions: leaders and their teams often use emotion to guide decision making rather than facts. This can happen when a hospital has a close business relationship with a vendor, or when a deal “feels” right. Instead, empower your team to make decisions based on market data to ensure your hospital is getting the best price.
- Speak a common language: a variety of stakeholders are involved with medical equipment purchases — from finance to supply chain to biomedical engineering to clinical departments. Each of these groups has its own way of looking at equipment purchases. Get everyone on the same page by ensuring the team is speaking a common language. This starts with giving all parties access to the right information.
These strategies can provide a useful framework for hospital executives looking to bend their cost curve and drive down medical equipment costs. For more details about these strategies along with examples of savings that other hospitals have realized, watch the webinar recording.
