It was 4:47 PM on a Thursday in March 2024 when my phone rang. A hospital supply manager on the line, voice tight: she needed 300 surgical packs by Monday morning. Normal lead time for that order was six business days. "Can you do it?" she asked.
I didn't say yes right away. I'd learned that a rush order almost never starts with a scheduling problem. It starts with a decision problem. Somewhere along the way, someone picked the lowest-priced option and hoped it would be good enough. That hope is expensive.
I've spent years in the medical supply side of healthcare—coordinating urgent orders, testing vendors, and cleaning up the results of cheap decisions. This isn't about one product category. I've seen the same mistake happen with Mölnlycke health care products, electronic pipettes, surgical energy devices, and even something as simple as how to use a nebulizer. The pattern is always the same.
The Surface Problem: Unit Price
The first thing a procurement team notices is the quote. Dressing A is $1.20. Dressing B is $2.10. Gloves from one supplier are $5 a box cheaper than the other. A surgical energy device has a lower sticker price than its competitor. The decision seems obvious.
But the obvious decision is often the wrong one.
In my role coordinating rush orders, I keep a running list of what happens after those obvious decisions. The box of gloves that arrived with the wrong sizing. The dressing that didn't adhere well, so nurses used more tape and changed it more often. The electronic pipette that looked identical on the spec sheet but needed calibration every quarter instead of every year.
Unit price is easy to measure. It fits neatly into a spreadsheet. It feels objective. But it's a fraction of the actual cost.
The Deeper Problem: We're Measuring the Wrong Thing
Why do smart buyers keep falling for the lowest unit price? Because total cost of ownership—TCO—is uncomfortable to calculate. It forces you to admit that you don't know how much nursing time costs, how often a device breaks, or how many extra days a patient spends in a hospital bed because of a complication.
Here's what I see when I look under the surface.
1. Fragmented purchasing hides the real total
Hospitals don't buy medical supplies. They buy dressings in the wound clinic, gloves in the operating room, an electronic pipette in the lab, a surgical energy device in the surgical suite. Each department has its own budget. Nobody sees the cross-department cost of a bad decision.
Last quarter alone, I helped untangle 47 rush orders. Not all were emergencies. Most were the result of someone trying to save money on a previous order. The savings on the invoice were tiny compared to the overtime, expedited shipping, and wasted clinical hours that followed.
2. Time is a cost—and we ignore it
A cheap wound dressing might do its job. But if it's hard to apply, doesn't stay in place, or damages fragile skin when it comes off, it creates time costs that dwarf the price difference.
This is where I see Mölnlycke health care products used well. Mölnlycke's dressings are built around Safetac® silicone adhesive technology, which is designed to minimize skin trauma and pain on removal. I'm not going to claim a single dressing works for every patient. But the idea matters: a dressing that requires fewer changes and less repair is a cost story, not just a clinical story.
I know a lot of people read Safetac as marketing. The way I see it, it's an engineering choice with financial consequences. Less trauma means less nursing time. Less pain means fewer rescue medications. Those savings show up on a different spreadsheet than the purchase price.
3. Training and usability are invisible
Take something as seemingly basic as how to use a nebulizer. It feels like the most basic clinical skill in respiratory care. But when a patient uses a nebulizer incorrectly—wrong angle, wrong flow rate, no cleaning—the drug doesn't reach the lungs the way it should. The patient doesn't get better. They come back. That's a readmission cost, and it starts with an assumption that no training is needed because it's just a nebulizer.
I've made that mistake myself. Earlier in my career, I assumed an experienced clinical team would figure out a product's quirks without instructions. The first time we rolled out a new line of surgical gowns, the staff couldn't identify the right size from the packaging. Not a clinical failure, but it cost us a full afternoon of confusion. A two-minute training video would have solved it.
4. Risk is a cost until it isn't
When a glove fails in surgery, or a dressing causes a skin injury, or a surgical energy device malfunctions, the cost isn't the product. It's the treatment, the extended OR time, the additional procedure, the documentation, maybe a legal review. I'm not going to name manufacturers, because this isn't about any single brand. It's about the way risk gets priced into—or out of—a purchasing decision.
A few years ago, a colleague in procurement skipped the final verification step on a rush order because we'd used that vendor for years. That was the one time the vendor sent the wrong product. The delay cost the hospital more than the entire order value. The decision wasn't about quality. It was about confidence without process.
The lowest-priced quote is only the lowest if nothing goes wrong.
The Cost of Getting This Wrong
Let's do a rough calculation. I'll use hypothetical numbers, but the logic holds.
Suppose one dressing costs $1 less than another. Seems rational to choose the cheaper one. But if the cheaper dressing needs to be changed twice a day, and a nurse's change takes five minutes at a loaded cost of $40 per hour, then each change costs $3.33. Two changes cost $6.66. Over a 14-day treatment episode, that's $93 in nursing time—per patient.
Suddenly the $1 saving per dressing looks like a rounding error.
The same math applies to capital equipment. An electronic pipette is a small purchase compared to an MRI, but the principles are identical. A device that needs calibration twice as often costs more in downtime and service fees. A surgical energy device with expensive proprietary consumables can drain an operating budget faster than its purchase price suggests.
ECRI Institute has repeatedly placed supply chain and device shortages on its annual Top 10 Health Technology Hazards list. Supply risk isn't an edge case anymore. It's part of the total cost conversation.
I'm not saying the lowest-priced product is always a mistake. There are cases where the cheap option is genuinely fine. But you can't know that until you've looked at the full cost picture.
A Better Way: Start With TCO
So what should a hospital do? Stop starting with the price list.
I've seen teams turn their purchasing habits around in three steps.
- Map the full cost cycle. For any product, write down the purchase price, the expected lifespan or number of uses, the consumables, the training time, the maintenance schedule, and the risk of failure. It doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to include the things that usually don't appear on a purchase order.
- Ask vendors for evidence, not just specs. How does the product perform in real clinical conditions? What data do you have on wear time, infection rates, or ease of use? If a supplier can't answer, that's useful information too.
- Pilot before you commit. Test a product on a small group of patients or a single OR for two weeks. Measure what actually happens: use time, rework, patient feedback. That data is worth more than any quote.
When I look at Mölnlycke Healthcare US LLC as an example, I don't see a company selling the cheapest box of dressings. I see a company publishing clinical data and backing its products with studies. That's the kind of supplier that makes TCO easier to calculate, because the evidence gives you something to project from.
Don't get me wrong—Mölnlycke products are not always the lowest-priced option. There are times when a less expensive alternative is perfectly appropriate. But the decision shouldn't be made on unit price alone. It should be made on the total cost of the product through the entire patient journey.
The next time someone tells you they found a cheaper quote, ask one question:
Compared to what total cost?
That question has saved me from more bad decisions than any spreadsheet. And it's the same question I wish that hospital supply manager had asked before the 4:47 phone call.
We delivered her order on time. The real fix came later, when she started running every major purchase through a TCO review instead of a price comparison.
There's no guarantee that change will be easy. Old habits die hard. But the alternative—saving $1 on a dressing and paying $93 in nursing time—is a habit no one can afford.
