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How COVID-19 has impacted the servicing of essential medical equipment

May 17, 2021
Parts And Service
Al Klotsche
By Al Klotsche

The ongoing pandemic has fundamentally changed our already strained healthcare industry. In the span of a year, healthcare providers have been forced to quickly adapt as COVID-19 continues to shift provider priorities as they search for agile approaches to deal with shrinking case volumes and declining revenue streams. So how do healthcare leaders look to the future to meet the challenge of a historic transformation that is irreversible and continues to be unpredictable?

Navigating successfully through this disruptive new world requires devising strategies that address multiple challenges, the foremost of which is figuring out how your organization will get the most of your service and repair needs at affordable prices. While daunting, it’s imperative to find a good service and repair partner who can help keep your equipment up and running. Here are some tips for getting the most out of servicing and repairing your essential imaging equipment.

Find the right partner
While service and repair is a highly technical industry, it’s also a people driven industry. Even during the age of masks and an overabundance of virtual meetings, relationships matter, now more than ever. Find a partner that really listens and understands your unique needs. They should also be 100 percent committed to doing the right thing to maximize the ROI on your medical equipment, so you and your staff have peace of mind. That includes ensuring maximum uptime, quickly diagnosing and fixing problems, and troubleshooting so there are no surprises.

You also need to ensure that your hospitals and clinics are getting exceptional service at the best price possible. Essential equipment must always be operating at peak performance to minimize downtime and maximize patient capacity. Your service and repair partner should be able to help you achieve that goal with customized approaches that meet the full continuum of your service and repair needs including field service engineers, depot, scopes, and parts and batteries. Your service partner’s historical data should be used to determine whether annual service contracts or hourly billed services are more beneficial for you.

Make decisions that maximize value
Providers need to take several things into account when negotiating pricing. While COVID-19 placed even greater pressure on everyone to find ways to gain cost efficiencies, that cannot come at the expense of quality care. Often, deciding whether or not to replace expensive essential equipment requires a reliable service maintenance partner who can provide an honest cost benefit analysis as to whether or not repairing or replacing an item is the best care versus cost solution. Your service partner should be providing you a break-even analysis on when replacing equipment makes more sense than continued repairs. Well-established service providers will have years of historical data to rely on for this analysis. If independent assessments aren’t proactively sought, facilities can potentially leave a lot of money on the table.

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