When a hospital’s medical staff faces postponing a patient’s treatment because of equipment downtime, their void points to the premise on which medical products marketplace company PartsSource Inc. was founded in 2001 – “ensuring that health care is always on.”

Mike Zamis, chief product officer, PartsSource Inc.

“That’s our tagline, and it works well for our business,” says Mike Zamis, the company’s chief product officer. The company specializes in finding and obtaining critical medical equipment and parts using an “evidenced-based” system of using marketplace data to match each healthcare facility client’s needs with the right equipment.

By using such data as known product quality and performance and supplier reliability, PartsSource says it helps more than 5,000 hospitals and over 15,000 clinical sites “achieve maximum savings and efficiencies” with over 4 million products and services from over 6,000 original equipment manufacturers and suppliers.

PartsSource’s medical products range from oxygen sensors priced at about $100 to hospital beds and medical imaging systems listed at thousands of dollars.

Zamis, who joined PartsSource four months ago and is a veteran of software-as-a-service technology for various types of business management applications, says PartsSource is looking to expand its growth strategy beyond its traditional core market.

“We are branching out from our core and moving into other elements that are naturally adjacent to what we do,” Zamis says. He mentions laboratories and life sciences as natural market extensions. Moreover, the company is pushing into non-medical products that all types of facilities as well as hospitals and health clinics use to maintain their operations.

More products, quicker purchasing process

In 2021, PartsSource added to its inventory over 1 million non-medical, facility-management products and now features items ranging from mops and hand-held power drill sets to safety vests used in disaster management.

As customers search for products, PartsSource monitors online purchasing activity and works with its suppliers to increase availability of any items in short supply.

It also works with customers to expedite the purchasing process.

“One of the best examples is a lot of customers are integrating their ERP or their maintenance management systems to PartsSource to really accelerate the purchasing process,” Zamis says, adding, “We’ve seen 95% decreases in the time it takes to process an order, literally going from 89 minutes to four minutes. You can punch out from your ERP and procurement software, go to PartSource.com, search, find and buy — and you’re done; you can move onto the next job.”

PartsSource.com lets buyers search for products by such criteria as category, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and models.

PartsSource uses the information it compiles and analyzes on product sales, usage and quality records to recommend particular products depending on a customer’s needs. The result, Zamis says: “We’ve seen a six-times increase in quality, in terms of the parts they buy.”

PartsSource also provides through it PartsSource Pro program a digital operations dashboard that lets clinical engineering teams better plan their operations by viewing such information as product order status, shipping information and the on-time delivery rates of individual vendors.

A growth area: selling services

PartsSource, a portfolio company of private equity firm Bain Capital, is also forging into services to complement its core business of supplying medical equipment and parts.

An equipment repair reservices program PartsSource launched in 2021 includes same-day or next-day repair and preventive maintenance for imaging equipment, such as X-Ray and CT scan machines, and biomedical products such as patient-monitoring and respiratory equipment. It also provides access to ongoing technical support for large equipment installation projects.

PartsSource expanded its services market significantly last year with the launch of its service contract management program, which helps hospitals and their clinical engineering teams manage equipment service contracts to keep their facilities and operating rooms stocked with properly functioning medical equipment.

“It is a big area of growth for us,” Zamis says.

Paul Demery is a Digital Commerce 360 contributing editor covering B2B digital commerce technology and strategy. [email protected].

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