In Chicago a few years ago, it was hard to escape the hype surrounding Groupon, a local Internet startup that made good.

The company, which e-mails its customers group-buy coupons for everything from electronics to cupcakes, made headlines with its innovative business model. In 2010, it even attracted a multi-billion dollar buyout offer from Google (which it turned down).

True, today, its reputation is not what it once was. The stock has lost half its value since it went public in November, and it has to compete with rival daily deal programs set up by Amazon and (yes) Google.

But the Windy City company's early success did leave an impression on the founders of OpenMarkets LLC., a start-up that makes its home in Skokie, Ill., a northwest suburb of Chicago not too far from Groupon's corporate headquarters.

Although OpenMarkets' model is quite different from Groupon's, the firm is also in the business of bringing the magic of group buys to consumers. In this case, it's for hospitals buying capital equipment.

"There's about $50 billion of capital being acquired every year, the majority of that by the 6,000 hospitals in the U.S.," says Dan Michalek, the company's co-founder and CEO. "There's just a tremendous amount of commonality in what all these hospitals are buying."

And OpenMarkets, which was launched about two years ago, hopes to take advantage of that commonality by aggregating buyers of mid-priced capital equipment to achieve bulk-purchasing discounts.

The idea works like this: OpenMarkets asks its client hospitals for their yearly capital equipment budgets. When it finds common ground — say, a number of hospitals want to buy ventilators in the fourth quarter — it approaches vendors to see if they can be sold on a deal. So far, OpenMarkets has held events for items like Draeger infant warmers, LG hospital-grade televisions and Philips defibrillators.

The key, as Tom Derrick, OpenMarkets' vice president, explains, is to create win-win situations for buyers and vendors. Buyers get cheaper equipment, but sellers -- while taking a price cut -- are guaranteed high-volume buys at a low cost of sale. The system might not work for the newest technology, when a manufacturer needs to use sales staff to explain benefits to would-be purchasers, Derrick says, but it could be the thing for more mature equipment in the marketplace.

HOW YOU SAVE MONEY

For the buyer, the draw is savings on products. These will vary a lot, but OpenMarkets says it has seen deductions between 5 and 45 percent on the "benchmark price," the lowest known amount recently spent on the item.

More Industry Headlines