BEST PRACTICES FOR MANAGING ENVIRONMENTAL SERVICES – Pricing Options – PART III

Pricing Options

Regna:

EVS contracts for the most part will be different, and each will have specific needs to be addressed. An outsourced company with experience in health-care settings will use production rates to maintain the facility. For example, if you have a facility that has five examination rooms, and each examination room is 35 square feet, you would multiply the five examination rooms by 35 feet to get a total square footage of the examination rooms. In this case, you would have 175 square feet of examination rooms. A reputable contractor who is looking to truly clean and disinfect the examination rooms will use a production rate of 650 to 850 square feet per hour, depending on the acuity of the room (low, medium, or high). Once you have the total hours needed to service the facility, then you will add in the fully loaded labor rate to the daily hours and multiple that by how many days per month the organization is looking for service. From this, you get the price to clean and disinfect the facility, with the understanding that labor is the biggest expenditure for service providers.

As new laws are being passed by county, city, state, and federal governments to increase minimum wages and living wages, the cost of labor continues to increase. As wages change, you will also see changes for providing mandated health insurance. The key is to get creative, know your facility, and understand what is required to provide a clean, disinfected, safe health-care environment.

The question was asked whether to either contract for services or use the staff from the facility to do the cleaning and disinfecting. In some cases you can do both, if the facility staff members clean and disinfect their own nonclinical work areas four times per week and the contractor does a deep weekly or monthly cleaning of those areas. This would reduce the organization’s cost to clean and disinfect.

– Mark Regna MBA, MHA, CHSP, CHCM

Corporate Vice President, Healthcare Services