Masterplan: Focused Dedication - Health Executive - Red Coat Publishing - Inside Healthcare

At a hospital in the Southeast, a patient gets up from his bed in intensive care, wheels his infusion pump down the hall, and fixes an imaging machine he’s learned is broken. Sound like a bad movie? It’s not. It’s an example of the dedication each of the 550 engineers at Masterplan show when dealing with their hospital customers.

David Winn, CEO

Founded in 1974, Masterplan is the largest pure-play clinical technology consulting and medical equipment maintenance and management organization in the country. The independent California-based organization differentiates itself from the larger monoliths in the industry with one key element: focused dedication.

A highly communicated and widely understood Masterplan corporate value is to work as though someone you love is the next to be admitted. Said CEO David Winn, “We’re not selling peanut butter. We’re helping save lives, and we’re helping the hospital staff by taking excellent care of their medical equipment so they only need to focus on the patient.”

As for the dedicated patient/engineer, it’s just one of what Winn calls the phenomenal side effects of watching Masterplan shift from an engineering-focused company to a customer-centric one backed by customer service training and improved communication. “I’ve worked in major corporations, and it’s hard to find that kind of dedication,” he said. “But in a smaller, more focused business where everyone is doing the same thing, you can reach out, touch people, and get them jazzed up about their jobs.”

100% success
Ninety-five percent of Masterplan’s work is for hospitals, where the company strives to have the equipment up and running 100% of the time. “We don’t sell equipment, and we aren’t managing cafeterias,” Winn said. “We focus all of our skills, systems, and training programs on equipment maintenance.”

In recent years, the company added flexible options to its service offerings. The MasterCare program offers fully capitated, flat-fee coverage of all devices in the hospital to ensure no cost overruns—this is Masterplan’s top-shelf service. FlexCare gives hospitals more choices by catering to specific financial and service capabilities with a customizable program to cover biomedical and diagnostic imaging equipment. PartnerCare provides customized solutions for inhouse biomedical departments, and OnDemandCare allows clients to choose what equipment they would like to have serviced on an as-needed basis.

“We added more flexible approaches based on requests from our clients. If the clients want to take risk on some devices, we’ll just do preventive maintenance on them and handle the rest on an as-needed basis,” said Winn. “Sometimes this level of coverage is in their best interest for back-up equipment.”

Most of the company’s services are geared toward adding flexibility to a hospital’s service contracts. Masterplan’s ability to help hospitals manage their maintenance costs while providing a high level of service quality is a key differentiator against the larger companies in the industry. The company works with clients on a consulting basis as well, analyzing what hospitals spend and showing how they can save after hiring Masterplan.

“We help customers meet Joint Commission survey standards,” Winn said. “Our auditors ensure our customers are ready to meet those inspections. We have never had a customer fail to meet the Joint Commission inspections under our watch.”

Full transparency
It is crucial for Masterplan to provide complete transparency when dealing with the healthcare industry. Consequently, in 2004, the company invested in iDesk, a fully integrated, Web-based system that manages and tracks each service call. The company initially used the software to manage its own business but soon realized by turning the system “inside out” for the customer, hospitals could see their schedules for preventative maintenance checks, what service calls were open, whether or not any machines are down and, if they were, why.

“That kind of transparency to a hospital’s inventory and where we are in taking care of it is reassuring to a hospital staff that has outsourced this critical function,” Winn said. “Even though they’re outsourcing it, they have full visibility on everything that is happening.”

Masterplan also meets with all of the hospital’s relevant staff once a quarter to share the statistics, including how many service events there were and the outcomes. And because the company has a national scope, it can compare one customer’s statistics with a national average. If a customer has high levels of machine failure, Masterplan will help them design training programs to bring it under control.

“We’re growing beyond just fixing what’s broken to helping hospitals design programs to provide better quality and safety to their patients on an ongoing basis,” said Winn. “We’ve also invested in remote diagnostics to manage equipment from afar, in some cases solving the problem remotely with a software fix. Even better, we’ve been able to preemptively notice, for instance, that the cryogen levels in a MRI are off, so we can go in and fix the machine before it breaks.”

Winn is as focused on the future of Masterplan as he is on the present. He watches other CEOs diversifying in all directions but has decided to stay focused. Although he would like to see the company expand into new markets, his only other goal is to continue improving the company’s service offerings to its customers.

“I love being a David in a field of Goliaths,” he said. “I like to be the guy who comes in and stands up for the hospitals. We do it not only on price but also on quality and flexibility. That’s what gets me up in the morning.”

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