The situation
Bryce Ridge’s intensive-care beds were eleven years old in 2023, and two had been out of service for parts for most of the previous winter. The hospital’s capital committee had approved replacement in principle, but the purchase competed with a CT scanner and a roof for the same year’s budget.
The unit’s census was also uneven. Winter occupancy ran above 90 percent; in late summer it fell below 60. A fixed lease would have charged the same in August as in January.
What we did
Wardmore financed sixteen new beds and two bariatric beds on Utilization Pricing. Each bed reports its own occupancy from its integrated scale, through the manufacturer’s remote-service connection, and the hospital is billed monthly for the occupied hours at a rate fixed for 72 months.
The minimum commitment was set at 62 percent of available bed-hours, just below the unit’s lowest month in the previous three years. Above that, the hospital pays only for hours it uses; in a month at the minimum, it pays the minimum.
The hospital’s finance team reconciles the monthly statement against its own census in the Client Center. In the first eighteen months the two differed by more than one percent in a single month, when two beds were moved to the step-down unit during a renovation, and the statement was corrected before it was due.
The result
In the first twelve months the unit’s beds were occupied for 81.2 percent of available hours. The hospital paid for those hours, plus the minimum in two summer months. Over the first two years the total was $412,600 less than the fixed lease Wardmore had quoted alongside, and the CT scanner was bought in the same year.
We stopped paying August prices for January beds, and January prices for August beds. That is the whole idea, and it works.
Published with the hospital’s permission. Figures are the hospital’s or Wardmore’s as stated, and individual results depend on each hospital’s circumstances.