Laundry consolidation to save millions for Jackson hospitals
Three Jackson hospitals have joined to consolidate laundry operation in a public-private partnership executives say will save each millions.
University of Mississippi Medical Center, St. Dominic Hospital and Baptist Health Systems will share laundry services using Crown Health Care Laundry Services, a national health care laundry processor that opened a location in Columbia in 2013.
The state College Board approved UMMC’s five-year agreement with Crown last week.
Crown officials expect to hire 30 to 35 additional employees at their Columbia plant as a result of the increased workload from these three contracts.
In October, Crown plans to open a laundry distribution center in the Jackson area to distribute the consolidated laundry from the three hospitals. This distribution center is expected to employ 12-15 people, with employment levels increasing as dictated by laundry volume.
Although each hospital will have a separate contract with Crown, the group issued a joint request-for-proposals through the Greater Jackson Chamber Partnership and jointly negotiated the terms of their contracts.
The cost savings will arrive via avoiding replacing expensive on-site laundry equipment, said LouAnn Woodward, UMMC’s vice chancellor for health affairs.
“The hospital’s laundry equipment is nearing the end of its useful life,” she said in an press release. “By shifting laundry operations to a third-party, we can realize a substantial savings on capital investment in new equipment, and the space occupied by our laundry facilities on campus can be repurposed for other uses. By unifying our laundry services, UMMC, Baptist and St. Dominic’s can allocate more resources to patient care.”
UMMC processes 4.2 million pounds on-site annually. Baptist Health Systems processes 4 million pounds; St. Dominic, 2.7 million. UMMC-Grenada maintains its own laundry facilities and is not included in the contract.
“After careful analysis, we determined that outsourcing our laundry services, in collaboration with other local hospitals, would free up physical space on our campus and allow for capital investment in new medical technology instead of replacing aging laundry equipment,” said St. Dominic President Lester Diamond.
Said Baptist Health Systems CEO Chris Anderson: “We are confident this will work well for each organization and its patients and look forward to other partnership efforts in the future.”
Contact Clay Chandler at (601) 961-7264 or cchandler@gannett.com. Follow @claychand on Twitter.