“Low-cost” often looks good on paper. But for hospice operations leaders, the real costs of durable medical equipment (DME) often show up off the invoice.
We’ve outlined where those hidden costs creep in — and how they impact your team, your nurses, and ultimately your ability to provide timely, coordinated care.
Where the Cost Hides
Rework and Manual Follow-Up
- Duplicate orders due to missed deliveries
- Calls to confirm items that should’ve already arrived
- Nurses or ops staff correcting vendor errors
After-Hours Escalations
- Missing equipment at shift change
- Weekend or night calls falling on your team
- “Emergency” deliveries that could’ve been prevented
Lack of Visibility
- No clear tracking or real-time updates
- Ops teams chasing down ETAs and status
- No centralized view of what’s been delivered, when, and by whom
Nurse Involvement in Logistics
- Clinical staff spending time on equipment coordination
- Delays in care when equipment isn’t available
- Burnout from tasks outside their job scope
Delayed Returns = Higher Spend
- Untracked equipment sitting in storage
- Unbilled or misbilled returns
- Manual cleanup of inventory waste
Why “Cheap” Isn’t Efficient
What’s often marketed as a simple, low-cost DME model turns out to be:
- Labor-intensive: requiring more internal follow-up
- Inconsistent: creating reliability issues
- Opaque: lacking system-level visibility
- Risk-prone: especially during off-hours or high-volume weeks
Even if the vendor rate looks good, the total operational cost adds up in:
- Patient experience issues
What Ops Teams Are Doing Instead
Hospice organizations that have moved away from “low-cost” models are:
Standardizing vendor expectations
- Requiring SLAs for delivery times, tracking, returns, and support
Using DME management platforms
- Gaining visibility across all orders, vendors, and branches
- Centralizing accountability in operations, not nursing
Measuring operational impact
- Tracking how long it takes to resolve issues
- Calculating cost of rework and escalations
Shielding clinicians from logistics
- Creating clear workflows that separate care from coordination
What to Watch For in Your Current Workflow
You might already be absorbing these costs if:
- Your team regularly works around your DME vendor
- You rely on spreadsheets to track deliveries
- Nurses are sending late-night “Where’s the bed?” texts
- Ops leaders are filling in gaps instead of scaling processes
- Your cost per patient is stable, but your team feels overworked
Takeaway
“Cheap” DME isn't cheap when it’s slowing down your team, burning out nurses, or requiring constant manual oversight.
If you’re measuring vendor performance only by rate — not by impact on operations — you’re likely missing the full picture.
Smarter DME management starts by asking:
What is our current process costing us in time, trust, and outcomes?