Did you know that 80% of all Telecom and IT related invoices contain billing errors, and that over 95% of invoices have services that aren’t needed (or aren’t billing at the best price point possible)?
Here is a list of some common Telecom and IT expenses that hold unnecessary hidden costs for hospitals:
Telecom & IT Expenses
- Wireless Phones
- Data Network
- Local Service
- Conferencing
- Pagers
- Landline Phones
- Disaster Planning or Recovery (backup phones)
- Bandwidth (internet and intranet) used for:
- Mobile Imaging
- Medical Record Transfers
- EMRs
- RFID
Consider the excessive costs hiding in one of these categories alone, then think about the enormity of the charges that are hiding across your entire IT system. With each passing year, the introduction of new technology expands your range of services exponentially. From cellular plans to web based conferencing to mobile applications, it seems that not a month goes by without a new add-on or feature required to increase efficiency or comply with federal regulations.
While these advances can be valuable, organizations often authorize purchases or upgrades without accounting for the fact that there’s an older or outdated feature that can be removed in turn.
This oversight is completely understandable due to the complexity of a hospital’s total telecom infrastructure. Most executives and managers are not telecom experts, nor should they be–they have more important things to do than comb through endless telecom bills looking for overages and redundancies.
But without attention paid, charges can build on themselves year over year until a hospital is paying nearly double what they actually use. So what can you do, without wasting your time down in the telecom weeds?