How intelligent clinical asset optimization can reduce costs and increases cash flow — 5 takeaways

Economic pressures are driving health system leaders to manage clinical assets more efficiently.

Many organizations are leveraging innovative clinical asset management solutions to achieve this goal.

During a recent Becker's Hospital Review webinar, sponsored by TRIMEDX, David Klumpe, PharmD, the company's president of clinical asset management, and Murphy McGraw, director of product management, described challenges related to clinical assets and summarized TRIMEDX's solutions and the financial benefits.

Five takeaways:

1. Economic pressures are causing healthcare leaders to seek clinical asset management solutions. These pressures include declining hospital profits and margins, constrained budgets and more care transitioning to alternative sites. The COVID-19 pandemic is only increasing these pressures, with 50 percent of health systems are deferring capital expenditures, Mr. Klumpe said, citing data from McKinsey. "Clinical assets account for about a quarter of the typical hospital's annual capital expenditures," he said.
2. Because of significant excess inventory, clinical assets need to be managed more efficiently. Amid these financial pressures, health systems have surplus equipment that is not being used in acute care settings. "Our data shows that a typical acute care hospital is only using 40 percent to 50 percent of the devices in their inventory on a given day," Mr. Klumpe said. As patients are increasingly seeking care in non-acute settings, the demand for medical equipment is shifting as well. This creates an opportunity for equipment redistribution to match the shift patient demands.
3. Health system leaders are seeking specific features in clinical asset management solutions. Among 100 health system executives surveyed by TRIMEDX, the most important features for a clinical asset management solution are: 1) the ability to proactively identify savings opportunities; 2) translating those opportunities into specific, actionable recommendations for inventory optimization and 3) being able to leverage devices across other sites of care, which is especially important as acute care volume shifts out of the hospital setting.
4. TRIMEDX helps health systems unlock the full potential of their clinical assets. TRIMEDX's comprehensive solution includes a best-in-class clinical engineering program that provides operational savings through standardized workflows and equipment maintenance; device safety and security that focuses on quality, regulatory and cyber excellence; along with a comprehensive clinical asset management program to optimize inventory and drive financial savings. TRIMEDX helps health systems answer the following questions:      

• • How much equipment do we own?
  • Where is our equipment located?
  • Is our medical equipment being used?
  • How much are we spending on rental equipment?
  • Do we have enough equipment to meet patient demand?

TRIMEDX's RUDR Score is a proprietary algorithm that analyses a variety of device data points to proactively offer recommendations for the replacement, upgrade, disposition or reallocation on each device. "This allows us to evolve the clinical asset management conversation beyond purely capital planning," Mr. McGraw said, "into true optimization opportunities with different actions depending on the data we're collecting." These prescriptive recommendations typically produce OpEx savings of 10 percent to 20 percent through inventory optimization, CapEx avoidance or deferral of 25 percent to 35 percent through strategic replacement planning and a 20 percent to 50 percent return above trade-in value from the sales of used excess devices.

5. Reallocating devices from the acute care setting to non-acute care can drive significant savings. TRIMEDX’s advanced analytics provide an accurate inventory of all clinical assets across the health system, national asset count benchmarking to identify areas of excess, and RUDR Scores that highlight specific devices recommended for reallocation. Many health systems have leveraged these powerful tools to move or transfer underutilized equipment to higher demand sites of care. Reallocating clinical assets can help health systems save on capital budgets and operating expenses by maximizing the utilization on devices they already own instead of purchasing additional equipment.

TRIMEDX provides actional insights that reveal significant financial savings, often totalling millions of dollars per year for health systems, while enhancing device availability and patient safety.

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