Outsourcing in Action: Elevating Retail Healthcare From Dental Clinics to Urgent Care

When you’re in retail healthcare, ensuring a world-class patient experience across your locations is vital to keep your business thriving. And as you expand to new locations, it can become even harder to maintain your high standards and manage an ever-growing fleet of assets. 

If you’re involved with operations or finance, you’re likely spread thin, addressing challenges like:

• Unpredictable costs from improvements and repairs to patient areas like the waiting room, exam room, and others.
• A lack of visibility into the total cost of ownership (TCO) throughout your assets’ lifecycles.
• Prioritizing medical-grade sanitation across all locations while safely disposing of hazardous material.
• High operating expenses that are cutting into profit margins.
• Difficulty prioritizing investments in new assets to replace outdated equipment.

Trying to keep up with all of these challenges could compromise your focus on patient care. That’s why more retail healthcare providers are choosing to elevate their patient care by outsourcing facilities care and maintenance to trusted, modern outsourcing partners. Think of it as outsourcing 2.0.

Read on to discover how retail healthcare providers across the industry are leveraging outsourcing 2.0 by finding the right partner to take their facilities management to the next level.

Why Outsourcing Is an Increasingly Appealing Option for Retail Healthcare Providers

Retail healthcare is a large industry with many verticals, all of which have unique challenges that outsourcing can help solve. 

From dental offices to urgent care clinics, medical spas to vet clinics, brands in this space are increasingly embracing outsourcing partnerships to optimize operations, reduce costs, and ensure high standards of service. To do this, they’re focusing on these three key areas:

1. Equipment maintenance and repair

Minimizing asset downtime should be a priority for retail healthcare providers. To provide patient care without disruptions, you need to ensure that your assets are working correctly. That includes practicing preventive maintenance to avoid emergency repairs.

Outsourcing can help with:

• Equipment calibration. For example, urgent care clinics require frequent diagnostic and therapeutic equipment calibration to ensure both accuracy and regulatory compliance.
• Finding specialized technicians. Take dental equipment, such as x-ray machines and dental chairs—these assets require specialized servicing for both repair and maintenance that relies on specific knowledge, skills, and parts.
• Prioritizing preventive maintenance. Medical spas, for one, rely on the preventive maintenance of tools, such as microdermabrasion machines and radiofrequency devices, to provide uninterrupted services that are safe and efficient.

2. Facilities management

Maintaining the spaces that both staff and patients spend their time in can have a huge impact on patient experience. Keeping pristine hygiene and sanitation standards is one of the most important aspects to maintain, but ensuring your patients’ comfort can also have a big impact on their care.

Two popular areas facilities management outsourcing are:

• Cleaning and janitorial. The critical nature of keeping spaces like treatment areas, waiting rooms, restrooms, and other facilities sanitized across all locations cannot be overstated. In an urgent care restroom where samples are collected, for instance, there would be a major health issue if sanitation standards were not met.
• HVAC, plumbing, and electrical. Keeping comfortable environments is an important aspect of patient experience, while essentials like plumbing and electrical affect providers’ ability to treat patients. Imagine the plumbing is out at a dentist’s office—the ability to perform cleanings and other work reliant on water access would be affected. 

3. IT and technology support

Much of what keeps healthcare businesses running smoothly lies with the technology they use. However, you may not have dedicated, in-house IT support to help when outages occur or to ensure patient data is highly protected and remains confidential.

For IT and technology support, providers are looking to outsourcing for:

• Scheduling/client management software. Many dentist offices, for example, rely on outsourced maintenance of their scheduling and client management software for up-to-date appointment availability. 
• Telehealth and electronic health records. In the case of urgent care facilities, it’s common to offer patients telehealth options, which are typically offered through a platform that needs to be updated and maintained. Without in-house IT teams, outsourcing can provide tremendous value. 
• Data security. Healthcare is highly regulated, and patient privacy/HIPAA must always be complied with. Outsourcing helps ensure system data is absolutely secure.

What is Outsourcing 2.0? 

While traditional outsourcing can help manage some of these operational needs,  there is a new model of outsourcing that acts as a partnership that helps accelerate your business forward. In short, modern outsourcing, or outsourcing 2.0, is changing the way retail healthcare leaders operate. And it’s especially powerful when it comes to facilities management.

Facilities management outsourcing 2.0 streamlines operations and is increasingly becoming a way to reduce operating expenditures (OPEX) as a business grows. Unlike traditional outsourcing, which can often be a set-it-and-forget-it type of partnership, outsourcing 2.0 leaves the strategy to you while handling the day-to-day repair and maintenance operations. 

This modern partnership is characterized by:

1. Transparency. Outsourcing 2.0 won’t leave you in the dark about who your outsourced service providers are, what they’re doing, and how much it’s really costing you. 

2. Sourcing service providers is off your plate. Instead of spending valuable time researching and sourcing service providers with the right qualifications, rates, and expertise, outsourcing 2.0 partners will do it for you, taking into account your budget and priorities. All you have to do is approve your partner’s recommendations.

3. Expert support. You can rely on a support team with in-field experience across trades and assets that will help you make informed strategic decisions about your facilities management. Some outsourcing partners will even work with service providers to ensure they are meeting your high standards and continually improving where necessary.

Facilities Outsourcing Is a Critical Strategic Move

For retail healthcare businesses that are expanding, protecting the customer experience across your locations doesn’t need to become more complex. In fact, it won’t be if you select a modern outsourcing partner. 

With traditional outsourcing, repairs and maintenance and facilities were two separate areas of focus, outsourcing 2.0 combines these areas for a holistic approach that saves you time and money.

With the right outsourcing partner, you’ll experience these benefits:

1. Control and reduce operating expenses

Optimize your spending with in-depth analytics, data-driven insights, and a robust preventive maintenance plan that reduces costs across the board. Reduce the number of emergency work orders and keep your assets running efficiently for longer to minimize downtime and maximize budget, allowing you to grow your business seamlessly.

The right outsourcing partners will also find the best service providers within budget, and provide defined standards of work with service level agreements (SLAs). These ensure high-quality work is performed efficiently to minimize adverse effects to operations and patient care.

2. Elevate the patient experience

The most important part of your business is patient care. When care is disrupted, it negatively impacts patient experience and ultimately your bottom line. When outsourcing your facilities management, you know your operations are running smoothly and assets are performing optimally. That creates opportunities to grow your loyal patient base and in turn, your revenue. 

And when providers can focus on what they do best—providing care to their patients—they can improve patient experience and ultimately, outcomes.

3. Maintain clean, safe environments

Any business should prioritize clean, safe environments for both their employees and customers, but if you’re in healthcare, doing so becomes a responsibility to your patients and in some areas, is mandated by the government. Whether it’s safely disposing of biohazard waste or simply keeping a clean, inviting waiting room, the right outsourcing partner will be able to maintain your high standards across all your locations.

4. Access flexible facility support

When you’re in a specialized field like healthcare, you can’t rely on just anyone to understand your facilities needs. Choosing an outsourcing partner with specialized trade knowledge lets you leverage specialized facility management when you need it, without the need for full-time hires. That means you can focus on actually running your business while minimizing any service disruptions and protecting your bottom line.

5. Seamlessly stay up to date

Keeping up with technology systems is difficult, so outsourcing to partners that can help improve efficiencies across the business, with tools like predictive maintenance and data analytics, is a huge advantage. Staying compliant is also essential, but it’s not always easy to stay on top of changing regulations. Outsourcing helps to maintain regulatory compliance and standards no matter how many locations you have.

Elevate Patient Care Without the Overhead

With a modern repair and maintenance outsourcing partner by your side, you really can do it all. From reduced downtime and maintaining immaculate environments to ensuring the precision of critical medical equipment, outsourcing provides a seamless way to uphold the highest standards in patient care.  

You don’t need an in-house team to achieve operational excellence. Outsourcing 2.0 enables you to focus on what truly matters: providing world-class care and experiences for your patients.