Why Rent When I Can Own?

Published in Respiratory & Sleep on April 29, 2024

By Rachel Marion, Sales Specialist, Trace Medical

Why would a provider want to rent their ventilator fleet rather than own their own assets? It all boils down to risk and investments.

Why Rent When I Can Own

To own a ventilator rental fleet can be incredibly expensive. Beyond the acquisition cost, warehousing space, inventory tracking, preventative maintenance, property insurance, and risk mitigation should be considered when factoring in the purchase price of equipment. How many ventilators are currently in your warehouse? Do you know how many ventilators are available to place on a patient or how many are deployed? Do you know where all of your owned assets are located at any given time? When market disruptions occur, like a recall, who handles the remediation of the equipment? What risk is there to your company with that market disruption?

With a rental fleet, risks are mitigated because they are no longer the providers’ problem to solve. It is the responsibility of the company who owns the asset, Trace Medical, to solve the problem. Costs for warehouse space, including property insurance costs, decrease due to the reduced need for the space. Providers no longer have to incur the costs of equipment on their shelves because they can deploy 100% of their assets. If they need to deploy equipment, they request it from Trace rather than using inventory from their own warehouses.

Ventilators are among the most expensive medical devices installed in homecare today. Since they are portable, they are easily lost or misplaced. They can also be mistakenly picked up by the wrong company. Companies can lose upward of 10% of their owned assets, which is about $7,000 to $15,000 per unit.

Tracking Your Inventory

Due to the cost of ventilators and the percentage lost, a way to track high-value assets was needed in our space to easily see where they are so providers can recover them if they are lost or deploy inventory more efficiently. The myTrace device was developed out of this need. Operationally, myTrace can help a provider deploy where assets need to be, and track where they are, and be more effective in their device utilization, helping utilize their full fleet, whether the inventory is owned or rented. The myTrace device allows for the provider to build geofence parameters around a specific location, which allows the provider to watch movement and get alerted if the device goes outside of those boundaries, which helps minimize losses.

Other tracking mechanisms do exist; however, myTrace was formulated to specifically work within a cost structure that is beneficial to HME providers. It was also important for a provider to have visibility through a portal that could be accessed both on a computer and a mobile device. This allows larger companies to be able to break down how many devices are in each region or local area.

myTrace has an 8–12-year battery life, attaches discretely to all valuable assets, and provides location, temperature, and battery life. It also allows for geo-fencing capabilities. Reports can be used for movement history, location history, alert history, such as temperature and battery status, and geofence entry and exit. The geofence allows the home medical equipment provider the ability to be notified if the equipment goes outside a set boundary.

Initially, the tracking device was imagined as a fantastic solution for customers with their own asset fleet that they manage outside of Trace Medical rentals, and then they have the option to deploy it in a rental scenario where it's appropriate for the customer. As the cost structure of this device has decreased over the last 2 years, Trace has deployed this tracking technology on their entire rental fleet, which represents tens of thousands of units deployed at no additional cost to providers.

To learn more about Trace Medical and myTrace, visit the Trace Medical vendor page on the member portal or listen to our recent podcast.