Let’s look next at your overall healthcare organization. Does your campus include an outpatient clinic? Is there an attached ambulatory service? If they’re owned by your hospital, the associated equipment and HTM costs must be included in your medical inventory.
Now let’s look at all equipment – not just what your biomed teams touch. Do you outsource servicing for laboratory or imaging equipment? Does any department have its own vendor contracts? Those dollars, too, need to go into your inventory because they’re part of your overarching HTM program.
Finally, look within your team’s daily operations. Have you factored in their salary and training costs? What about chargeback fees for the square footage – a primary factor for determining service rates and reimbursements – occupied by your workrooms and your share of the utility bills? Don’t forget what you spend on replacement parts, cleaning supplies and even shipping, which can add up quickly when you need overnight delivery to keep life-saving equipment running.
In our experience, most organizations don’t include half of these items in their inventory. If you don’t know your costs down to the penny, how do you know if you’re spending that money in the best way possible? The bottom line is that each of these dollars is part of your comprehensive HTM budget, even if they aren’t all in the same budget line. From experience, those outside services contracts are where most hospitals have the widest blind spots, often leading to significant cost creep when there’s not a spending cap, since your core HTM program doesn’t have insight into out-of-scope billings.
How to use your inventory
A well-constructed clinical asset inventory serves as a centralized resource, which can deliver immediate value to managing your program HTM and gauging its performance.
While your HTM program director should maintain this inventory, be sure to share this tool and its insights to be leveraged strategically across your organization. For instance, your purchasing team can get greater visibility across all contracts to determine duplications or gaps in exposure and align with the service delivery strategy. Your financial team should look at total cost, not just the HTM team or partner cost, as well as use this data to manage depreciation of your clinical assets. Your nursing team can help you understand where technology is antiquated or doesn’t put patient safety first. And your senior leaders should use this information to negotiate reimbursements, as well as find opportunities to gain a competitive advantage over the hospital down the street.
