3 ways to cut costs like the Cleveland Clinic

Most attendees at this year's Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) conference in Nashville are looking to trim costs for their 2016 budgets, and the behemoth Cleveland Clinic is no exception.

The sheer size of the organization, which employs 34,000 caregivers, offers plenty of opportunity to save money without compromising on quality, Michael O'Connell, vice president of clinical and support services at the Cleveland Clinic, Marymount Hospital, said in front of a packed ballroom at the Gaylord Opry Convention Center.

O'Connell presented 30 cost-saving ideas in all--a mere sampling of hundreds--many of which Cleveland Clinic caregivers themselves suggested as part of its MyTwoCents Program. Adding up to thousands if not millions of dollars in savings, these cost-savers fell into the following broad categories:

  • Change default settings to eliminate waste. By simply changing the default printer setting to print double-sided pages, organizations can cut paper costs in half. The setting can be changed if needed, such as when a supervisor must print individual employee evaluations. The change was not popular with staff, O'Connell said, noting that support from leadership was essential in fielding complaints. Today, 90 percent of the paper pages printed at the Cleveland Clinic are double-sided. The organization applied a similar strategy to prescription writing, by changing the default to electronic prescribing rather than paper printing.
  • Shop around. Like many other practices, the Cleveland Clinic purchased certain supplies from specific vendors for little reason other than habit. By shopping around for products of equal quality for lower cost--and often consolidating from several vendors to one--the group saved thousands of dollars on items such as sterile gloves, wound cleanser, surgery-site markers and alcohol swabs.
  • Cut outdated services. Now that smartphones have become ubiquitous, your practice may be paying for telephone lines, fax lines and pagers that rarely get used. By turning off unused phones in just one department (six lines), the Cleveland Clinic saved $1,500 per year. O'Connell recommended that practices take similar inventory of the types of software they pay to renew every year that personnel may no longer use or need.