Why Hospitals and Patients Both Benefit From Medical Equipment Rentals

IV infusion pumps are devices that are used to deliver medication or nutrients to a patient in a liquid dosage form. Although there are two main ways to accomplish this, electric pumps offer a more accessible and safer way of administering intravenous fluids. Today, many hospitals make use of electric infusion pumps. That said, maintaining a steady stock of them can be difficult if your hospital serves an excessive number of patients. That's why it's essential to figure out the best way to obtain the equipment you need while staying on-budget and without disrupting the patient quality of care.

When it comes to obtaining equipment for your facility, you have a couple of options. You can purchase the required equipment directly, or you can acquire what you need through medical equipment rentals. Renting equipment and infusion machines, in particular, can be a smart investment for any healthcare provider.

Medical Equipment Rentals

For any significant hospital, especially one that sees hundreds of new patients every day, owning every piece of necessary equipment outright can be prohibitively expensive. This is what makes medical equipment rentals invaluable to hospital operation. It's estimated that a standard hospital rents close to 35,000 SKUs of medical equipment overall. While this may seem like a lot, when you consider all the patients and individual cases a hospital may have to work with on any given day, it makes a lot of sense. By renting equipment, a hospital can mitigate the cost of buying medical devices while still being able to provide the care that patients need and expect.

Infusion pumps are one of the most commonly rented medical items in America. With nearly 86% of all patients requiring one of these pumps, it's essential to ensure a hospital always has enough on hand. In 2016 alone, the number of people admitted to hospitals was 35.7 million, with each stay averaging 4.6 days. With that in mind, we can see how important a steady stock of infusion pumps can be for any hospital across the nation. But because many medical facilities have strict budgets to consider, outright ownership of medical equipment may not be possible. By renting this equipment instead, these facilities can continue their operations while prioritizing sufficient cost savings and even benefit from improved technology.

Choosing Electric Pumps

While the manual administration of fluids is possible, electric infusion pumps help reduce the margin for error as well as alert staff to issues that may persist. Smart pumps come equipped with infusion rates and dosage alerts that can help signal dosage rate or infusion rate errors. For a hospital that can use the same pump in the ICU one day and the NICU another, these alerts can prevent injury by shutting down the unit and alerting staff to the issue.

These pumps can also come with backup battery sources, up and down pressure alerts, as well as air-in-line alarms that detect any air that may have accidentally entered the system. Each of these safety features can go a long way towards helping make sure each patient is treated correctly and without risk of error, either mechanical or human.

If you require additional infusion pumps at your workplace, consider medical equipment rentals to obtain the highest quality machines for a more affordable price. Using this method, you can choose from a variety of different brands, each with their own sets of features and specific benefits. You can also mix and match types to ensure you have both large volume and small volume infusion pumps for every instance. When it comes to managing a hospital, it's always better to be over-equipped.