HOW LEASING HELPS SOLVE THESE CHALLENGES FACING HEALTH SYSTEMS

I have spent years helping hospitals acquire and manage the IT and clinical devices they need to provide the highest quality patient care, and I’ve seen first-hand the crucial role technology plays in achieving good health outcomes.

But hospitals face challenges that go beyond delivering care. They must keep their budgets in line, keep a wide range of medical devices up-to-date and ensure they can attract the best and the brightest to work in their facilities.

Technology—especially if it is acquired through innovative leasing solutions—offers help with these challenges, too.

Here are three common challenges that healthcare providers face, and how working with CHG-MERIDIAN helps hospitals overcome them:

Purchasing a new PACs system, CT scanner or ventilator means an enormous, up-front payment that may not have been anticipated.

Leasing spreads the cost of new equipment over 36 to 60 months, which is an easier timeframe to budget for. When they need to be replaced, the new equipment can be obtained with new lease payments that may be less, the same, or only slightly higher than the old payments.

Hospitals can acquire more equipment through leasing for the same budget. A million dollars from the budget in a given year buys $1 million worth of equipment. With leasing, that same $1 million may permit the hospital to acquire $3 million of equipment over five years by spreading the cost over time and allocating appropriate dollars over the five years for the lease payments.

Leasing arrangements like these take much of the pressure off hospital budgets and ensure that departments within the same facility do not have to compete with each other to acquire the best equipment and devices.

Outdated equipment severely impacts patient safety and physician satisfaction. It also dramatically increases the total cost of ownership of that equipment.

I’ve seen clinical engineers in a hospital searching eBay for used equipment to scavenge for parts because a failing medical device they’re using has been “retired” by the manufacturer, and service or parts are no longer available for it. It’s disconcerting, to say the least, because a patient’s life could depend on that device.

By utilizing leasing and refreshing equipment on a defined basis—be it every 36, 48, 60 or 72 months—equipment will always be covered by the manufacturer’s warranty or certified for service.

In addition, healthcare providers are in the business of delivering patient care, not de-installing and disposing of a personal computer, a linear accelerator or an MRI machine. CHG-MERIDIAN is.

Along with our global network of partners, we buy and sell off-lease healthcare equipment in 25 countries. A six- to seven-year-old ventilator in the U.S. may not have much value or takers in the secondary market, but in eastern Europe or Brazil, its fair market value is many times greater. By harvesting that greater value, CHG can provide competitive lease payments on the new equipment to our customers in the U.S, hence lowering their total cost of ownership.

Hospitals are like other businesses in that they must attract and retain the best talent to deliver the best results. Having the very latest in medical technology plays an important role in accomplishing this key objective.

A talented radiologist considering two job offers is far more likely to choose the facility with a two-year-old, 128-slice CT scanner over the facility with an eight-year-old, 32-slice scanner.

Hospitals that lease with a partner like CHG-MERIDIAN have the budget for the most up-to-date equipment and can refresh it regularly. We also take an important job off administrators’ plates: disposing of outdated equipment without incurring the fines that come with HIPAA violations.

When leased equipment is returned to CHG-MERIDIAN, it is sanitized according to the NIST 800-88 standards of data media destruction, and the hospital receives certificates of assured destruction of the data.

The best job candidates, be they clinicians or hospital administrators, want to see that the facility has—and properly handles—the best technology available today. And CHG-MERIDIAN can help ensure a hospital will attract and retain the brightest and the best.

Technology, after all, plays an important role in the overall quality of care and it serves patients, physicians and the hospital’s bottom line to have a rhythm and rigor in their refresh of IT and clinical technology assets.

Leasing, I’ve learned in my more than 30 years working in the industry, is the proven and smart way to help a hospital improve its health outcomes, ensure staff satisfaction and lower the cost of delivering care.