How Year-Round Lifecycle Planning Guides Hospitals' Capital Equipment Spending
It's mid-October, and your hospital's capital committee is working through next year's equipment requests. The list is ranked by age, so a 12-year-old CT scanner is near the top, even though nothing's wrong with it. Two floors down, a sterilizer handles instruments for every surgical case in your building. If it fails, the operating room schedule goes with it — but the sterilizer isn't on the list because it's only six years old.
Healthcare technology management (HTM) teams weigh condition, repair history, and patient safety when it comes to recommending a replacement, but decisions often come down to age. A purchase date is simple to document and hard to dispute, and a capital committee finds no shortage of long-serving assets even as spending climbs. Capital expenditures at not-for-profit hospitals and health systems covered by Fitch Ratings reached a median 123.4% of depreciation in fiscal 2024, the highest since 2013. Over that span, the average age of plant increased annually from 10.6 to 12.7 years.
What happens when a device stops working depends on whether there's a backup and what role it plays in patient care. Continuous lifecycle planning that monitors both areas guides your spending toward the technology you can least afford to lose.
Tight Margins Keep End-of-Life Devices in Service
Hospitals are making capital investments while their finances remain tight. Kaufman Hall put the median hospital margin at 1.4% year to date through July after accounting for health system shared-service costs. With margins that thin, an organization can fund only a few replacements a year, and the hard part is choosing which ones.
Anything that misses the cut can outlast its manufacturer's support. In March, U.S. PIRG Education Fund found that 77% of the medical repair professionals it surveyed often service equipment that manufacturers have declared end-of-life, and 81% of those who work mostly in rural facilities said the same.
End-of-life devices can also fall behind on security updates. ECRI lists cybersecurity risks among its top health technology hazards because unpatched devices can give attackers a way into healthcare networks. The organization says mitigating actions must be implemented when replacement isn't feasible, and your HTM partner should assign each connected device a risk level and recommend next steps.
Prioritizing Replacement by Risk and Redundancy
When your hospital has several of the same device, losing one for a few days is usually manageable. Staff can work around it with the other units or send patients elsewhere while the repair gets done. But when your facility has just one CT, your Emergency Room may have to divert patients to another hospital until it's back in service.
The Joint Commission's PE.04.01.01, EP 2 requires hospitals to identify equipment "for which there is a risk of serious injury or even death," reinforcing the idea that a device's importance in patient care can't be judged solely by its age.
ANSI/AAMI EQ56, the national standard for medical equipment management programs, sets conditions for inventory management and service continuity. It also calls on any organizations that maintain an institution's devices to create an outage plan.
You should expect that plan to show how care would continue when the only device of its kind breaks down. If the answer is to wait on parts, that's a strong case for building redundancy and holding older equipment as a backup.
What a Thorough Medical Equipment Asset Review Includes
A year-round asset review looks at how difficult it is to keep each device running. It also shows where work orders stall and when upkeep starts to outweigh the price of a new one.
There's no specific cost threshold that says when to stop paying for repairs. The closer equipment gets to the end of its expected life, the more important it is to understand repair history, frequency of repairs and uptime. Ongoing tracking leaves time to assess a specific device or category of devices before an outage forces it.
An analysis like this is only as good as the records behind it. When acquisition date fields are incomplete or you need to address Physician needs, the maintenance data may not answer these questions. A work order that notes what broke has to be aligned with whether the device has a backup, to drive decision making about what should be retired or replaced.
How InterMed Supports Lifecycle Planning and Capital Strategy
A partnership model lets you retain control of your HTM program while InterMed tailors its support to address your needs. InterMed builds asset reviews around how critical a device is and whether it has a backup, so hospital leadership has more information before making capital decisions.
InterMed's vendor-neutral technicians work alongside your internal departments to track usage, repair history, and parts availability. Because they're trained across manufacturers and modalities, their work brings the fleet into one consistent view.
InterMed complies with ISO 13485, the recognized standard among HTM providers, supporting accreditation surveys and departments seamlessly.
AAMI recommends that HTM takes part in capital planning, equipment acquisition, and product evaluation. InterMed brings that history to the table when you negotiate your next purchase or identify a future service delivery plan..
Plan Your Next Capital Cycle With InterMed
Before your capital committee meets, know which devices your hospital can't do without and whether you have redundancy for each asset. Those answers let you plan a replacement before a failure turns it into an emergency purchase. Email sales@intermed1.com or call 800-768-8622 to connect with an InterMed advisor who can walk through your fleet with you and recommend where to start.