Medical Offices

Already challenged by long-term financial pressures, hospitals and healthcare providers have been battered by the COVID-19 pandemic. During surges, many hospitals had to restrict or shut down non-essential services and revenue-generating procedures. The pandemic has also driven longer hospital stays, declining emergency room visits and personnel shortages that have required a reliance on costly contingency staffing solutions. All of these factors have combined to increase operating costs and shrink margins.

As they chart their post-pandemic recovery strategies, top priorities for healthcare CFOs include preparing for consolidations, acquisitions and mergers, as well as seeking new sources of capital funding, primarily through private equity channels. All of these activities involve due diligence and a granular level of third-party scrutiny. In this environment, a high degree of operational and fiscal discipline is critical. Put simply, a CFO whose hospital is either pursuing an acquisition or is itself an acquisition target needs to have his or her ducks lined up in a row and standing at attention.

Tracking Hospital Equipment

For CFOs pressured to demonstrate a fiscally tight ship, improving oversight of mobile clinical assets and hospital equipment can be a good starting point. Today, inadequate management of equipment costs hospitals millions of dollars a year, and results in annual shrinkage loss of between 15 percent to 35 percent of total asset costs. Hospitals lack the tools and processes to monitor or locate equipment such as portable MRI and X-ray machines and respirators. Doctors and nurses waste precious time simply looking for equipment, resulting in delayed treatment and compromised quality of care for patients. Lost assets and theft are major problems.  A single hospital, for example, recently reported $11 million in missing items over a four-year period, and instances abound of pilfered equipment showing up on eBay.

Lack of asset management also drives costs by draining efficiency and productivity. Hospitals that can’t locate and monitor assets have to buy and rent additional equipment, resulting in bloated inventories and higher maintenance costs. Nurses who spend hours a day simply looking for something, meanwhile, often resort to hoarding critical devices for quick access when needed.

 Real-Time Location System Plus (RLTS+).