Are you getting ready to set up a Medical Practice?

Setting up a Medical Practice is never easy, you have to consider many things like:

• How many Treatment rooms will you be setting up?
• How many Consult rooms will you need?
• How many Allied Health rooms will you require?
• With all the medical equipment, which brands should you choose?
• Do I need to purchase all my consumables at the same time?

And the list goes on.....

Here are our top 10 tips and tricks to consider when you are about to embark on this project to make sure that you have covered all your needs and are set up to succeed with your medical practice set up.

1. Plan ahead - Download our free medical practice checklist and use it to select the equipment categories you feel are the right fit for your practice.

2. Brand Selection - Which brands do you generally like to use in your medical practice? Some of the most common brands would include Welch Allyn, HEINE, MESI, Vitalograph, Medisafe, Vacc-Safe, Mocom, Omron and Seca.

3. Connection and integration - Did you know that some medical equipment when purchased together can integrate together? This will give you a structured and seamless connection into your patient management system. Some connect with Best Practice and others connect with Medical Director. MESI is a fantastic brand 'Simplifying Diagnostics' is their logo, their equipment comes in ECG, ABI, ABPI, TBI, Blood Pressure or Sphygmomanometer, all linked into a simple tablet that integrates with most patient management systems.

4. Equipment that attracts medical rebates - There are many medical equipment that will enable you to bill a medical rebate through an item number such as Spirometry, ECG machines, ABI and ABPI machines. Having equipment like this at your medical practice will give you a point of difference, but will also assist you in generating revenue for your surgery.

5. Which consumables do your nurses like - Choosing medical consumables can be daunting, especially when thinking of all the different woundcare products and brands, instruments, infection prevention and PPE, cleaning solutions, pharmaceuticals and needles and syringes. We find that the best way to solve this is to first determine if you would like to stock the major brands or stock alternative products such as inhealth which do a variety of PPE, wound care, sterilisation and pulse oximetry at a cheaper price. This can really help to keep your budget down.

6. Accessibility of your facility - Have you left enough space to mauver large equipment around in your surgery? Future proofing your surgery is essential, you may need to replace a vaccine fridge or an autoclave at some stage in the future. Having enough space to pull out and install a large single door fridge or a autoclave for sterilisation is important.

9. Cold Chain Storage - Vaccines are an essential part of every medical practice. From travel vaccines to influenza vaccines, you will have cold chain products in your medical practice all year round. This will mean you will require a good quality fridge with a decent data logger, preferably with cloud based monitoring. The Medisafe Avem Quirks range is the best choice here as they have AQ Box inbuilt with cloud based monitoring. However if you are after a premium medical fridge without the price tag, then the Vacc-Safe range is the perfect choice. You may also want to consider a Undisturbed Power Supply (UPS) to connect to your fridge, the last thing you want is to have thousands of dollars of vaccines breach due to a power shortage.

10. Wi-Fi connection - Wi-Fi is very important to consider, many of the latest equipment integrate with your patient management systems via either an ethernet cable or predominantly over Wi-Fi. How far away is your Wi-Fi modem? Can you pick up a good signal from your treatment room? You may want to consider installing a repeater or access point to increase the range of your Wi-Fi for better medical equipment connectivity. MESI mTABLET equipment is the latest technology for ECG, ABI, ABPI and Blood Pressure. MESI requires a strong Wi-Fi connection to enable optimal results.

9. Finance - How are you going to pay for the set up? This is an important factor to consider. Will you require finance, and have you received approval? Or will you be paying up front. 

10. Choice of Supplier - Choosing a supplier for medical equipment and consumables is an important decision to make. You need a partner that is reliable and has good stock levels with an excellent range of products. Vital Medical Supplies carries 17,000 medical products in 5 warehouses nationally, we are reliable and efficient. We offer experienced Territory Managers who can assist you in making the right choice for you and your medical practice. Vital Medical Supplies will offer you product training on all your new medical equipment as well as after sales service and support.