I am entrepreneur, so I see the business world primarily through an entrepreneur’s eyes.  My role as CEO of BHN takes me inside many large hospitals and clinics.  I am always amazed at how capital intensive these operations are.  They have a device or machine for everything, and all the people with the right skills to operate the equipment as well.  As an entrepreneur, this just does not make sense to me.  As entrepreneur I've learned to look at capital as a very precious resource.   For hospitals, it certainly makes sense to have certain devices/equipment present for critical care needs (i.e. a defibrillator), but for other assets it does not make sense.  It would seem more logical and cost effective to share some of these capital-intensive resources with other locations or even other hospitals. 

I have the benefit (and sometimes curse) of having an engineering degree and a finance degree. Due to this background I tend to analyze everything.  In dealing with clinics and hospitals of all sizes, I see numerous purchase decisions being made.  Sometimes the purchase decision is related to direct purchase of medical equipment, and sometimes it's related to a rent rather than buy decision. 

We have recently released and Urodynamics Equipment Buyer's Guide.  You might want to check it out if you are involved in urodynamics testing.

I was recently having a conversation with a very successful urogynecologist that operates in on the East Coast.  We were talking about diagnostics (such as urodynamics), the cost of the equipment, and the difficulty of retaining well-trained staff.  He was surprised to learn that we served many large urogynecology practices and urology practices. He assumed that all of these large practices would perform their urodynamics testing in house.  His thinking was that the clinic would be much more profitable if it owned the equipment, trained the staff, and dealt with all the other details to be able to deliver urodynamics testing services to their patients.  This is true for some large urology and urogynecology practices, however it is certainly not true for many practices.  Also, I believe he was not considering all of the pertinent details related to outsourcing diagnostics.