Curing a Headache: Facility Management Firms Can Help
At a time when economic pressures are forcing health care organizations to operate more efficiently at every turn, it can be difficult for providers to identify and implement strategies for cost reduction. However, there is one area where health organizations with multiple sites and facilities can cut expenses by an average of 25 percent or more.
Every clinic, surgical center or medical office consistently deals with minor and major repairs, such as leaky roofs, broken television sets, landscaping needs, heating and cooling issues, pest control and electrical problems. For management of multi-site health care systems, routine maintenance is often riddled with redundancy and inefficiency, resulting in wasted time and money.
Many health care organizations across the country have generated reductions in maintenance expenses by using third-party facility management firms to minimize unnecessary expenditures and reduce maintenance costs. By outsourcing these responsibilities, administrators can focus on serving patients.
With sophisticated software, facility management firms handle the entire work order process by building a customized database of preferred vendors who can address common maintenance issues quickly.
This centralized resource positively impacts several areas, including:
- Quality of vendors. By centralizing work orders for maintenance requests, a health care organization can increase both the quality of work and fairness of pricing from vendors. Through an extensive database, vendors can be compared across geographic areas, job type or other variables.
- Preventative maintenance. In many cases, clinics and medical offices can extend the longevity of key equipment by two or three years if they're diligent about preventative maintenance. Considering some of the costs involved with major purchases, such as heating and cooling units, this offers significant cost cutting opportunities. Keeping an accurate inventory of equipment and required service schedules ensures facilities are using equipment and utility systems effectively.
- Unnecessary expenses. Two areas of unnecessary spending come from paying for repairs that are the responsibility of the landlord, and paying for repairs to equipment that is still under warranty. Both of these areas can be monitored by a facility management company, which logs warranty information and leasing agreements and cross-references those for each repair.
- Business continuity. A serious problem, such as a breakdown with heating or cooling, can negatively impact the operation of a facility if it's not addressed quickly and competently. Through a facility management company, providers can minimize the time and monetary costs of unexpected business interruptions.
The first step for organizations considering facility management services is to determine what is being spent on maintenance and repairs and whether centralizing those expenses would result in cost savings.
The cost of facilities management increases in value the bigger the operation. If an organization only has two locations, managing maintenance requests is probably not an issue. If the network involves 30 locations, outsourcing facilities management is something to seriously consider. For a company that operates 300 or 500 locations, facilities management services are critical.
Whether it's replacing light bulbs and coffeepots or air conditioning units, health care professionals don't have the time to spare. With the options now available in the facility management market, they can happily remove handyman from their job descriptions while enhancing their financial operations.
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- Nashville Business Journal: Curing a headache: Facility management firms can help
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Grandview Medical Center