When Did You Last Review Your Perfusion Contract?

Somewhere in your hospital's contract files is a perfusion services agreement. It was likely signed years ago, it has quietly auto-renewed every year since, and — if your hospital is typical — no one has independently reviewed it in a long time. No one is asking the simple question a good CFO asks of every other major vendor: are we still being charged fairly?

Perfusion is the contract no one revisits

Hospitals renegotiate their large supply and service contracts on a cycle. Perfusion is the exception. It is clinically specialized, it is a modest line compared to the OR as a whole, and the people who understand the clinical side rarely own the commercial side. So the agreement renews, year after year, on terms set in a market that no longer exists — and the longer it runs untouched, the further the pricing can drift from what it should be.

No one inside the hospital is positioned to check

This is not negligence; it is structure. The CFO does not have the clinical detail to judge whether a per-case rate or a coverage model is reasonable. The perfusionists — often employed by the vendor — are not going to audit their own employer. Supply chain sees the invoices but not the clinical justification. The result is a service that everyone assumes someone else is watching, and no one actually is.

What drifts in three years

The vendor will not prompt the review

It is worth being blunt: a vendor on a comfortable, auto-renewing agreement has no incentive to raise its hand and suggest you re-examine the terms. That is not a criticism of vendors — it is how every commercial relationship works. The prompt has to come from the hospital. And if no one inside the hospital is assigned to perfusion, the prompt never comes.

Why every three years

Three years is long enough that the market, your case volume, and your clinical standards have all moved — and short enough that the drift has not compounded into a large, entrenched overpayment. A disciplined review every three years does not mean switching vendors. Most of the time it means confirming you are still well-priced, or correcting terms that quietly fell behind. Occasionally it surfaces a gap worth a great deal. Either way, you now know instead of assume.

What a real review covers

Who does the reviewing

The one thing the review cannot be is a self-assessment by the vendor. It needs an independent party with both the clinical fluency to judge whether a coverage model or product mix is reasonable and the commercial fluency to benchmark the pricing — with no stake in the contract's renewal. That independence is the entire point of a Perfusion Program Management Organization: to give hospital administration a trustworthy answer to the question no one inside is positioned to ask — are we still being charged fairly, and is this still the right agreement? Put a three-year review on the calendar, and give it to someone whose only job is the truth.