With the new focus of the Affordable Care Act, hospitals are under increasing pressure to reduce costs while increasing the quality of care they provide and patient satisfaction. This means that even medical equipment procurement has to be as efficient as possible to help keep overall hospital costs down. So how do you uncover hidden costs and ensure you know what you're paying for?
Purchasing medical equipment in the current regulatory and financial landscape means that capital expenditures need to be thought through and executed carefully. Purchases that were once routine now have to be reviewed up the chain - sometimes all the way to the CEO or CFO.
As you purchase and plan equipment for your facilities, you probably visualize when, where and how various devices are most used. When it comes to patient intake, chances are good the first step in the process is fairly constant: taking vital signs. These important indicators are critical to properly triaging, diagnosing and treating each unique patient according to his or her specific need.
The task of opening a new medical facility is a huge undertaking. It requires licensing, permits, community consensus, and financial support to make it happen. Once you’ve got all of that sorted out, you get to the fun part, buying everything you need to outfit your new facility.
Nearly every healthcare provider will need to order new capital medical equipment at least once, if not multiple times during any given fiscal year. However, with rapidly changing healthcare policies and ever-increasing budget cuts, getting the best equipment and supplies at a great price is getting harder than ever. Especially, if you do not address the following five hidden costs associated with ordering capital medical equipment:
Whether you’re setting up a new electronic health record (EHR) system in your current facility, or working on plans for outfitting a new clinic or hospital wing, it’s important to keep in mind specific items related to implementing the EHR successfully.
The logistics of scheduling delivery of new capital equipment can be challenging and should be carefully considered with any purchase. The time and expense of procuring the equipment can be daunting, but if you don’t plan the delivery properly, you may cause unnecessary costs for an already expensive venture.
Keeping up with the advancements of the healthcare industry can be an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. When addressing medical equipment procurement, whether for new facility construction, building expansion or for an update to an existing one, having an efficient and cost conscious process is critical.
During the ordering process, there are times where an ordered product is back-ordered or no longer available, meaning that the department manager or director in charge of ordering must return to the beginning of the process and begin researching for an acceptable substitute. This process can be repeated multiple times and has an immense time and therefore financial, cost.
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