Is Poor Medical Equipment Planning Costing your Healthcare Project Wasted Dollars and Delays? ECRI Institute outlines best practices to ensure bette...( PLYMOUTH MEETING Pa. Oct. 28 -- Horr...),Health

PLYMOUTH MEETING, Pa., Oct. 28 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Horror stories related to medical equipment for new construction or renovations are far too common. Hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars are wasted, and delays in go-live dates can stretch into months. ECRI Institute (www.ecri.org), an independent nonprofit that researches the best approaches to improving patient care, outlines a process for medical equipment issues and 6 best practices to ensure a better outcome in a just-released white paper, A $1 Million Change Order and a 6-Week Delay(C).

"Healthcare construction projects offer a once-in-a-decade opportunity to design and equip clinical environments so that clinical workflow and patient care is improved," advises Thomas Skorup, MBA, FACHE, vice president of applied solutions, ECRI Institute. "However, we've seen too many projects derail when some critical issues are overlooked, such as not building infrastructure that can adapt to new technology and shelling out scarce resources for an unnecessary wish list of equipment."

The new paper highlights some costly examples of what can happen when medical equipment planning issues aren't well coordinated. It proposes a decision-making process which includes coordinating all stakeholders, providing expertise and vision, and using cost-effective technologies to ensure the hospital's resources and quality of care are optimized. Two of the six best practices that ECRI Institute recommends in the paper include paying close attention to the preliminary equipment budget and keeping a watchful eye on the equipment creep.

The white paper, available for free download, draws upon ECRI I
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