From the May 2014 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


Greg Mika: The biggest thing we’re doing here to maintain our budgets is making it clear as to what we do and why we do it. We are reporting to committees that report to the top and we send monthly PM reports to show that we’re critical. We haven’t done things to increase our budget, but we’re doing everything we can to maintain what we do. We’re part of patient care and decreasing our budget would have an adverse affect in the long run.

In the last year or so, we’ve started a safety huddle at our hospital, where people from different areas of the hospital and all the nursing areas report to discuss — we do 15 minutes every morning. It heightens awareness, and reinforces safety practices. It’s not only important because we have input, but it also puts us in front of the team and lets us communicate and reinforces our position and value.


Heidi Horn: I am finding that being able to justify my staffing levels and department’s expenses is more important than ever. I’ve always benchmarked my staffing and expenses, but now those justifications are being reviewed very closely at all levels of the organization. There is a lot of pressure not only to hold the line on expenses, but also to decrease it. In addition, we’re being asked to do more with the same staff. Ten years ago, we maintained clinical equipment. That’s pretty much all we did. Today, we are taking the lead role in almost all clinical device purchase reviews and contract negotiations. We’re negotiating service and parts agreements with vendors. We’re the project managers on all clinical device installations systemwide. We work closely with IT on a daily basis to interface devices with the network, and other hardware and software. We’re also much more involved in clinical device safety issues — everything from identifying emerging safety trends to facilitating system-wide teams to correct them. We’re also spending a lot more time consulting with department and system leadership on health care technology issues.

Steve Vanderzee: What I see in Advocate HealthCare is that we’re being asked to extend the life of the equipment, so we’re not replacing as quickly as we have in the past, so that’s obviously adding value by extending the life of the equipment and saving some capital dollars that can be used in other places. At the same time, we’re being asked to look for opportunities to reduce our overall budgets. So we’ve been looking for the past couple years at our service contracts and seeing if there are opportunities for us to take the service in-house, or roll the dice sort-to-speak and go without a contract. Sometimes, time/materials/service is a better risk than staying on contract. But in addition to the volatility we have in the budget and the customer service and software updates, all those types of things are generally part of a contract, not as a time/material/service situation. Justifying up to eight to 15 percent of acquisition value is typical versus three to five percent cost we’ve even seen as low as two percent on the time/material/services.

May 2014 Magazine

Read more stories from the May 2014 issue

More Magazine Features

More Voices