Lowering VA Medical Equipment Maintenance Costs: Looking at Self-Insured Risk Pools

摘要

Exploring innovative ways to provide high quality maintenance at a lower cost is a top priority of many biomedical engineers at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). As pressure to decrease costs become more intense, VA medical centers have begun looking outside the organization for new best practices and better ways to operate their departments. One of the ideas being explored by biomedical engineers is a risk management pool where expensive service contracts are cancelled and a portion of the money that would have been spent on a service contract is put into a fund control point to finance needed maintenance. This project, Lowering VA Medical Equipment Maintenance Costs: Looking at Self-Insured Risk Pools examines the results of several risk pools that have been recently established as an alternative to maintenance contracts in five Veterans Integrated Service Networks (VISNs). Actual expenditures are tracked for FY 98 (1 October 1997 to 30 September 1998) and compared to the original contract cost estimate. In all VISNs, the costs were lower with the establishment of the risk pool.