From the August 2013 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


Bill Kollitz: I think for service providers who are adding value it’s a good thing — we can talk in terms of total value and total solution for hospitals. I think it’s going to help providers who are providing true value to the field.

Kevin Haralson: It’s still just the opposite here – sometimes I wish administration would take it because I think we’d have better luck persuading physicians, but what we had to spend quite a bit of effort to get in place here is, we get to look at any capital purchase before it’s actually approved and we get to have our time with the vendor to make sure the service manual is provided, which increasingly they don’t want to do, and we get that in writing on the quote because you have a lot more leverage when the vendor is waiting to sell the equipment. It’s much harder to get that done after the sell.


Usually a computer comes with something now — does the OEM have to provide that or can we buy one off the shelf that has the specs that they require? We can usually buy ten computers [ourselves] for the cost of one computer [through a vendor] and surprisingly, many vendors don’t care as long as you get the right specs. We do a technical review of the quote to make sure we don’t miss things that the customers don’t always know about — sometimes stuff would show up that wouldn’t work with our systems here and it’s a big headache to turn that around.

Todd Reinke: I think that decisions will be made with fewer, large players driving economies of scale. Buying power will be increased which is a good thing. However, it is important that clinical results and patient satisfaction aren’t sacrificed. It is going to be important for every service provider to be able to educate decision-makers on the business risks and rewards around their service choice.

Mike Swinford: It’s driving in a positive way — there’s a tremendous amount of money that’s spent on service and the C-suites are thinking more broadly about getting the best returns on investment versus just trying to get the lowest maintenance. It’s driving the discussion more towards outcomes, asset utilization, compliance, safety —it certainly makes selling and partnering a tougher challenge because depending on the hospital or the health care provider, it’s not a standard process.
Everyone’s got a different set of priorities and challenges, so we, as a service provider, need to make sure we have a wide range of offerings — whether they have an in-house group they need to train so we need to provide, e-commerce solutions, or whether they want to outsource everything, or anything in between. We need to make sure we have offerings to cover any scenario any executive wants to have. They’re creative, they want to challenge the status quo and make sure their partners are aligned with their key initiatives and metrics. We make sure that our technologies are aligned to do just that.

August 2013 Magazine

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