Hospital mergers and acquisitions have spiked in recently years, but for these consolidations to be successful, the health system needs to know how to integrate most efficiently.

Since hospitals don't have the resources to conduct a complete assessment, ECRI Institute is offering PriceGuide — a new service to help fill the need.

The PriceGuide service helps the health systems control their spending and develop plans for eliminating waste and redundancy when purchasing medical supplies and equipment.
ECRI has a price benchmarking database of almost 1.5 million medical-surgical supplies and implants and another database of 1.4 million adverse events tied to specific technologies.

The institute has access to evidence-based research on devices and procedures, and information on downtime and service costs. It can also perform extensive tests on medical devices at its on-site lab.

In a price parity report, ECRI identified $3.2 million in potential savings for one supply transaction and almost $1.3 million for another. The experts find the greatest opportunities to save on supplies by negotiating the lowest price available.

The service also helps health systems develop a comprehensive plan for equipment acquisition, replacement and redeployment. The goal of the plan is to maximize the use of existing equipment and allocate funds to key technology areas such as radiology, surgery and cardiology.

A hospital system was preparing to put itself on the market and ECRI was able to identify $6.7 million in potential capital savings through the redeployment, replacement and retirement of equipment over a 12-month time frame.

"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," Thomas E. Skorup, vice president of ECRI's Applied Solutions Group, said in a statement.

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