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Department saves $.5M in maintenance costs by Heather Murphy Public Relations They keep coming. Budget cut, after budget cut after budget cut.  In the age of budget slashing, it’s nice to know a department at MUSC took control of its budget situation and consequently will save MUSC approximately $500,000 this year. In April 2001, Stan Trojanowski, biomedical engineering manager, took control of his department’s situation via the University HealthSystem Consortium’s (UHC) CAMP, or Capital Asset Management Program. “By doing things through the UHC, we save 15 percent of our budget up front versus our old method of original equipment maintenance (OEM) contracts with equipment vendors,” Trojanowski said. “The bottom line is that we end up saving at the end of the year, approximately 30 percent.” Back in 2001 when pressure mounted to reduce the number of OEM contracts, Trojanowski and his team considered a variety of options, including third party management agreements with big corporations like General Electric or Phillips.  Then UHC entered the picture.  UHC’s CAMP helps the biomedical engineering department track expenses against an equipment repair budget, and whatever’s left at the end of the year comes back to MUSC in the form of a check. A nonprofit group, UHC’s goal is to help academic medical institutions function more efficiently, or in the words of Stephen Swierczek, CAMP program director, “They tell us what hurts and we try to help fix it.” Currently 189 pieces of medical center equipment from CT Scanners and MRIs to lasers and microscopes receive coverage under the equipment maintenance budget. “The program is not a solution in and of itself, rather it serves to make in-house operations stronger,” Swierczek said. “CAMP is a tool used by hospitals to work with vendors, build that in-house support and improve capabilities.” While the move to CAMP remains a relatively smooth road, Trojanowski cited one problem stemming from the way vendors adapted to the hospital’s use of CAMP. “When one of our physicians calls a vendor and asks for service, the vendor tells the physician that as soon as the vendor has served all of its contracted customers, they’ll be right over,” he said. “Of course this gets people upset because it demonstrates a supposed priority that contracted service customers gain over other customers. In reality, no objective document exists demonstrating a difference in response time for those service calls.” And not having a contract relationship with an equipment vendor works out to the medical center’s benefit when it safeguards the center from paying for services not needed. For example, JCAHO states a particular type of laser must be serviced two times a year. In many cases, medical centers purchase a service contract from the vendor depicting the laser to be serviced an unnecessary four times a year. So essentially, the center ends up paying for two check-ups the laser doesn’t need.  “I like to look at it this way: You only spend money on food when you feel hungry,” Trojanowski said.   Catalyst Online is published weekly, updated as needed and improved from time to time by the MUSC Office of Public Relations for the faculty, employees and students of the Medical University of South Carolina. Catalyst Online editor, Kim Draughn, can be reached at 792-4107 or by email, catalyst@musc.edu. Editorial copy can be submitted to Catalyst Online and to The Catalyst in print by fax, 792-6723, or by email to petersnd@musc.edu or catalyst@musc.edu. To place an ad in The Catalyst hardcopy, call Community Press at 849-1778.