Dive Brief:
- A new Boston-based startup, Cohealo, believes sharing is caring when done through their new medical equipment sharing platform. The program is built to help hospitals and medical centers share expensive medical equipment to help cut utilization costs.
- According to a Fortune Magazine article, the new company brings the "Uber" model of ride-sharing to how hospitals use medical equipment. Many devices used in hospitals and surgical facilities are very expensive to either rent or own, especially when much of that equipment sits dormant more than half the time.
- Cohealo's wants to increase medical equipment usage to up to 80%, with projections that hospitals could save as much as $7 million by using its sharing platform, which not only keeps current inventory information but also manages shipping, delivery and calibration for the hospitals in their system. Cohealo is already serving two of the largest health systems in the US, which serve about 15% of the paid US population.
Dive Insight:
It’s rare when a new concept comes along that both makes logical sense and works, but this one is showing a lot of promise.
The medical equipment business has long been a headache for hospital administrators, because the two current choices available to them—renting and owning—have been rigged for a long time. Outfits that rent medical equipment often use sliding scales that charge the hospital almost as much to rent the equipment as they would pay to own it. Meanwhile, technology is moving so fast, manufacturers often introduce upgrades before their existing clients have even come close to paying for the older model they bought last year.
Moreover, many of these machines sit dormant much of the time, making it a race to see if their current rate of utilization will be enough to make the next payment. As hospitals are actively looking at new models for equipment financing, Cohealo’s solution offers an interesting method for savings that may help hospitals across the board without massive new capital expenditures.