ECRI Institute has launched a mergers and acquisitions service that enables new hospital alliances to control their spending and plan for the future by eliminating waste and redundancy in medical-surgical supplies and capital medical equipment.
For supplies, ECRI Institute identifies the greatest opportunities for savings by negotiating to the lowest price available. For example, by analyzing purchase order histories and pricing data for merging organizations, ECRI Institute’s price parity reports identified $3.2 million in potential savings for one transaction, and nearly $1.3 million for another.
ECRI experts highlight product categories with significant overlap and compare them to the categories that will require product conversion.”With supply costs set to eclipse labor costs in just a few years, hospitals can use ECRI Institute’s independent benchmarking capabilities and market analytics to negotiate the best pricing and deepest discounts from their suppliers,” says Timothy Browne, director of ECRI Institute’s PriceGuide service.
For capital equipment, ECRI Institute’s new service reduces expenditures by helping newly merged health systems develop a data-driven predictive replacement plan for equipment acquisition, replacement, and redeployment. Based on clinical, safety, operational, and obsolescence criteria, the plan focuses on maximizing use of existing medical equipment and expanding capital availability in key technology areas such as radiology, surgery, and cardiology.
In the case of one hospital system that was preparing to put itself on the market, ECRI Institute uncovered $6.7 million of potential capital savings from the redeployment, replacement, and retirement of key technologies over a 12-month period.
“ECRI Institute accelerates the capital equipment integration efforts of newly merged health systems so our customers can more quickly realize the benefits of standardization, bundled system-wide purchasing, asset redeployment, and strategic replacement planning,” says Thomas E. Skorup, MBA, FACHE, vice president of ECRI Institute’s Applied Solutions Group.
