by
John R. Fischer, Senior Reporter | August 27, 2018
From the August 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Ultimately, the question of which service type is right for a provider comes down to which one can offer the best deal – and there’s no one right answer.
Advantages and disadvantages
Providers today are more educated and willing to take risks to obtain flexibility, creativity and cost-saving in their equipment service contracts. These desires have led all parties to become more aggressive in their pricing and open-ended in the sale of their service contracts. But it’s the actual services that require assessing for providers, to determine what the best fit is for their needs.
“We’re a 3PL (third-party logistics) organization. That makes it possible for us to get parts and tools to customers much more quickly and much more efficiently than a lot of ISOs would be able to manage, particularly the smaller ones,” said Siemens’ Barbati. “I can’t say this for certain, but I don’t know of any ISO that has a 3PL delivery system.”
This is just one advantage that Siemens and other OEMs possess, according to Barbati, adding that ISOs are more familiar with equipment that has been on the market for a considerable amount of time and therefore, may not be able to service new equipment as well as an MVS.
MVSs may also offer full-training organizations to help customers learn to evaluate and improve their clinical workflow and products, such as Siemens’ Share360, which provides end users with tools and knowledge for servicing equipment themselves, capabilities Barbati contends most ISOs have not developed.
“From the Philips perspective, I have the same set of requirements around how I service competitive products as I service Philips products, both in terms of my day-to-day activities and in how I report it, and the data that I show my customer,” said Salmons. “I think the OEMs collectively have a pretty mature QMS process to help guide us day-to-day in how we deliver multi-vendor services.”
More ISOs, though, according to Ken Smith, senior VP of sales and marketing for Oxford Instruments Healthcare, are becoming better equipped to offer many of the same services provided by MVS divisions at a more competitive cost.
“ISO consolidation has created independent organizations that have the scale and resources to compete with the OEMs, providing the same level of quality, experience and expertise but at a better value-based price because of the lower overhead,” he said.
ISOs may also have a reputation as being more nimble, capable of responding quickly to mitigate issues before they occur and initiate decisions around parts and overtime without necessarily having to consult managers, compared to the bureaucratic and regimented structure of MVS divisions.
