In today’s post-pandemic environment, hospitals are facing ongoing financial uncertainty. This includes the availability of sufficient capital funding for investments in medical, lab and IT equipment. Most hospitals are reporting that the capital needed to fully fund their “ideal” equipment replacement strategy is not available, and getting all the needs addressed may be hard for the foreseeable future. It may be tempting to simply accept this limitation, cross your fingers, and hope current equipment doesn’t fail. However, there are other ways to overcome this problem.
Consider alternate payment strategies to accelerate strategic equipment replacement. Today, a growing number of medical equipment manufacturers offer creative financing options such as leases, deferred payments and placement agreements to help hospitals fund equipment purchases. While not all CFOs are comfortable with some of these creative alternatives, they can be valuable at the right time.
Recently a Miga hospital client had budgeted $23 million in capital to replace old equipment in the upcoming budget year. However, the total capital needed to fund replacement of all “critical” equipment totaled $113 million. In addition to stretching their budget by purchasing a number of systems used instead of new, the hospital took advantage of creative financing from several manufacturers and were able to fund nearly 85% of the most urgent items from their wish list. They plan to repeat this strategy in future years as a way to keep their clinical technology most current. The benefits of alternate payment strategies are numerous, including keeping physicians and staff confident in the resources they have available to deliver quality patient care.
Miga Solutions provides the most accurate and actionable pricing information, enabling hospitals to lower their medical equipment total cost of ownership (TCO) by 12-16%. To learn more about how your hospital can save, contact us.
