After training scores of healthcare organizations over the last two decades how to ferret out their "invisible" costs or utilization misalignments (over-utilization or under-utilization of products, services and technologies), I have calculated that these "invisible" cost are costing the typical 250-bed hospital $750,000 to $2 million dollars annually and that fact isn’t even on anybody’s radar screen. These savings are hidden in your purchases of surgical products, lab products, imaging products, general medical products, drug purchases, utilities, insurance, etc., without you even knowing it. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about.

In one category alone, specialty bed rental utilization, a 73% savings was achieved by a 251-bed Pennsylvania community hospital client. This hospital’s project manager saved $107,444 (on a $147,285 annual spend) after being trained in a new money-saving system in their investigation of their specialty rental beds. How could this "huge" savings happen?

First by identifying through a "targeted" utilization analysis that this hospital’s specialty rental bed expenditures were 13.7x higher than their peers. Second, the hospital’s project manager employed a new process that enabled them to scientifically plan, organize, functionally analyze, and implement a new specialty bed rental policy and procedures, and develop a new specialty bed product mix.

Most importantly, this hospital didn’t know they had utilization challenges until our "targeted" utilization analysis raised their awareness with 25 additional high-yield savings categories which represented $2.3 million in add-on savings for this hospital.

As this example demonstrates its been my experience that all hospitals universally have waste and inefficiencies in supply/value chain that is going undetected; all hospitals (regardless of size) need new innovative and customized methods and practices to weed out utilization misalignments in the thousands of their products, services and technologies they are purchasing annually. This is an emerging "best practice" that is an ongoing journey – not a quest, because "things change and people change "even if your manufacturers, distributors and GPOs remain the same!