By Erin Register
In 2015, Chloe Alpert’s grandmother was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and she spent four months in and out of hospitals. While there, she started to see the challenges hospitals faced with supply chain and excess equipment, and a year later, she met someone who had started a nonprofit that took in donated excess supplies from hospitals.
“It was so inspiring that I started looking into the medical equipment market myself,” said Alpert. “I ended up falling down a rabbit hole and spent an entire year researching the secondary market. I realized the way we buy and sell medical equipment really has not changed in nearly 30 years. There have been some minor concept changes, but it is largely brokers, auctions and listings.”
Alpert then realized hospitals need a total digital asset management solution, and that is what she set out to build with the co-founders of Medinas.
Since starting Medinas, Alpert and company have won the $500K Forbes Under 30 Global Change the World Competition and the $1M Global Wework Creator Awards, and helped hospitals save over $30 million in sales equivalency in their first year of operating.
Q: What is the main focus of Medinas?
A: Medinas is a total asset management solution for hospitals and health care facilities. We help them easily manage all of their assets while they’re in service and then find the optimal buyer for those assets when it’s time to upgrade or replace them. And we do mean all of a facility’s assets. We do not just come in and “cherry pick” their best equipment or drive off into the night with a truck full of equipment and send them a check after the fact. We come in early in the process, so we can help simplify and solve asset management, redeployment and remarketing with one-click data-driven solutions.
Q: What are some of the services Medinas offers?
A: Medinas’ five main product features include a pre-owned medical equipment marketplace that includes digital offer management, an online bluebook for real-time and forecasted capital equipment pricing data, asset management, asset redeployment and maintenance management.
Q: How does Medinas stand out in the medical equipment field?
A: Each hospital is assigned its own dedicated account managers, who are located onsite and help hospital personnel with the tedious and time-consuming actions involved in the management and sale of assets. The platform only offers assets for sale from hospitals. Brokers, dealers or individuals are allowed to purchase from the platform but cannot sell, giving buyers the security of knowing that every asset listed exists, is high quality “as-is” and “where-is” equipment, and has been serviced and maintained to Joint Commission standards.
We also have a smarter way of selling equipment than through auction, which is the status quo. We’ve analyzed over 10 years of data and discovered the auction model fails to produce the best prices for used medical equipment. That’s because auctions end at a pre-set time, rather than when the ideal buyer is found. That means sellers lose money and equipment doesn’t end up where it is needed most. By using an offer-based model with equipment listings that don’t have an artificial end-date, Medinas ensures that the right buyer is matched to each piece of equipment we sell. We further ensure that equipment sells for the right sale price by providing suggested equipment values based on real market data.
Lastly, we value our buyers just as much as our sellers. Medinas treats and deals with our buyers as partners, not just as a way to sell equipment, and we work to help bring our buyers’ valuable services to the hospitals that we are partnering with.
Q: Do you have any specific goals that you want Medinas to achieve in the near future?
A: Our goal is to help reduce waste in health care by bringing together the best minds in Silicon Valley with the best minds in health care to create a true digital asset management solution that hospitals need and deserve. Right now, we are focused on partnering with more hospitals since the success of our pilots has been overwhelming.