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October 8, 2001

Reduce Your Equipment Maintenance Cost By Up To 50% BY ADOPTING A STRATEGIC INTEGRATION STRATEGY™

7% to 10% percent of a healthcare organization’s operating budget is spent annually on some form of equipment maintenance e.g. preventive maintenance, service contracts, in-house service, third party contractors, technical insurance, or self-insurance. Surprisingly, up to 50% of these expenses are being squandered at most healthcare organizations, due to the lack of a Strategic Integration Strategy™(SIS) to provide a continuum of strategies, tactics and techniques for your equipment maintenance organization-wide.

Typically, equipment maintenance is a decentralized activity managed by your organization’s department heads and managers largely by their own devices. This has occurred because no organization-wide “Equipment Maintenance Masterplan” exists to seamlessly provide for equipment maintenance at the right time, with the right strategy and at the right price.  The result is a hodgepodge of strategies, tactics and techniques that are unnecessarily eating away your equipment maintenance budget.

If your organization develops a “Equipment Maintenance Masterplan” utilizing the Strategic Integration Strategy™ to manage your equipment maintenance equipment up to 50% of your maintenance cost can be reduced within three years of adopting the plan.  The Strategic Integration Strategy™ is based on the philosophy that “one size maintenance solutions doesn’t fit all situations”, e.g., technical insurance coverage for all equipment maintenance as a hospital policy.  The basic tenet of SIS is that a much better way to make your equipment maintenance decisions is to establish a set of rules to guide your maintenance decisions that will change over time as things change and people change.

As an example, one rule could be that all equipment requiring maintenance or PM that would normally cost $5,000 or less for a maintenance contract would be self-insured under the SIS strategy.  In this case, you would utilize time and material contractors or your own maintenance or bioengineering staff, when service or PM would be required.  This is a low risk strategy that can save your healthcare organization up to 80% annually on your equipment maintenance dollars. Another rule could be that third party con-tractors (all things being equal) would be used exclusively for maintenance service and PMs as opposed to the original equipment manufacturer’s service departments.  This change of policy alone could save your hospital 25% on all service calls for this category of equipment.