ECRI Institute Jumpstarts Savings for Hospitals During Mergers and Acquisitions

PLYMOUTH MEETING, Pa., Jan. 17, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The No. 1 reason hospital mergers or acquisitions don't make it? Failure to integrate. A precursor to any successful integration is a systematic review of contract portfolios and equipment inventories.

Unfortunately, many hospitals don't have the resources to perform a complete assessment in these areas—essentially risking millions of dollars in potential savings and inadvertently creating new safety and quality risks.

Today, ECRI Institute announces a mergers and acquisitions service that empowers new hospital alliances to control their spending and plan for the future by eliminating waste and redundancy in medical-surgical supplies and capital medical equipment.

For supplies, ECRI Institute identifies the greatest opportunities for savings by negotiating to the lowest price available. For example, by analyzing purchase order histories and pricing data for merging organizations, ECRI Institute's price parity reports identified $3.2 million in potential savings for one transaction, and nearly $1.3 million for another.

ECRI experts highlight product categories with significant overlap and compare them to the categories that will require product conversion.

"With supply costs set to eclipse labor costs in just a few years, hospitals can use ECRI Institute's independent benchmarking capabilities and market analytics to negotiate the best pricing and deepest discounts from their suppliers," says Timothy Browne, director of ECRI Institute's PriceGuide service.

For capital equipment, ECRI Institute's new service reduces expenditures by helping newly merged health systems develop a data-driven predictive replacement plan for equipment acquisition, replacement, and redeployment.

Based on clinical, safety, operational, and obsolescence criteria, the plan focuses on maximizing use of existing medical equipment and expanding capital availability in key technology areas such as radiology, surgery, and cardiology.

In the case of one hospital system that was preparing to put itself on the market, ECRI Institute uncovered $6.7 million of potential capital savings from the redeployment, replacement, and retirement of key technologies over a 12-month period.

"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," says Thomas E. Skorup, MBA, FACHE, vice president of ECRI Institute's Applied Solutions Group.

With a price benchmarking database of nearly 1.5 million medical-surgical supplies and implants; a database of 1.4 million adverse events and their ties to specific technologies; evidence-based research on the latest drugs, devices, genetic tests, processes, and procedures; expertise in improving culture, infrastructure, practices, and technology; extensive medical device testing capabilities in our on-site labs; and access to information on downtime and service costs, ECRI Institute is uniquely qualified to steer hospital mergers and acquisitions toward success.

To learn more about ECRI Institute's hospital mergers and acquisitions service, please visit www.ecri.org/merger, download our free infographic, or contact ECRI Institute by telephone at (610) 825-6000, ext. 5655; by e-mail at [email protected]; or by mail at 5200 Butler Pike, Plymouth Meeting, PA 19462-1298, USA.

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About ECRI Institute
ECRI Institute (www.ecri.org), a nonprofit organization, dedicates itself to bringing the discipline of applied scientific research to healthcare to discover which medical procedures, devices, drugs, and processes are best to enable improved patient care. As pioneers in this science for nearly 50 years, ECRI Institute marries experience and independence with the objectivity of evidence-based research. Strict conflict-of-interest guidelines ensure objectivity. ECRI Institute is designated an Evidence-based Practice Center by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. ECRI Institute PSO is listed as a federally certified Patient Safety Organization by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Find ECRI Institute on Facebook (www.facebook.com/ECRIInstitute) and on Twitter (www.twitter.com/ECRI_Institute).

SOURCE ECRI Institute

Related Links

http://www.ecri.org