Choosing a medical laundry service should mean considering several different factors simultaneously, including the cost of the service, available alternatives, the quality of a service, how well the service can scale with your needs and the speed and reliability at which a service can clean and return materials.
Factors to Consider When Choosing a Medical Laundry Service
Some factors to consider when choosing a medical laundry service include the following:
1. Cost
It’s quite reasonable to start by considering the cost of a service when deciding whether it may be good for your business or not. Although quality service is often pricier than poor service, it isn’t a one-to-one ratio. Some services are better and cheaper. However, it’s important that a business considers cost correctly.
Many businesses make the mistake of assuming something is cheaper to do themselves because doing so tends to hide costs. However, keep in mind that doing laundry yourself means staff members, company resources and space (if you’re doing laundry on site) all have to be dedicated to the task. This means there can be a significant opportunity cost to doing your own laundry that isn’t immediately obvious when first looking at the numbers.
2. Alternatives
When choosing a laundry service, you should compare any service you’re thinking about with the most reasonable alternatives available to you. This can take some research and basic math to determine which option is actually ideal, but it’s worth it if you’re going to use a service for what’s likely intended to be multiple years or more. A short-term investment of time into performing good research can save hundreds or even thousands of dollars over the lifetime of a business.
Understanding these alternatives can also be good if your needs evolve or the capabilities or cost of your first choice change in some way. Blind loyalty rarely has a place in business. Understanding all options available to you and knowing when it makes financial sense to switch services is only going to serve your business well.
3. Service Quality
As we discussed earlier, the cost of a service isn’t everything. The quality of that service should also be an important factor considered when choosing the option that fits you best. Consider everything a business can offer you at a particular price point, putting special emphasis on the parts of their offer that are most relevant to your needs.
Some businesses may have extra features that don’t add anything to the cost of what they offer. For example, at Alsco, we have put an emphasis on sustainability when building our company and designing our model. If you use our laundry services, the odds are good that we can perform the same tasks significantly greener than if your company had to do them on their own or used a different service.
If you’re ever unsure about the features a particular company can offer, don’t be afraid to ask. Sometimes, you may be even able to negotiate something you need that isn’t normally offered, but a company is willing to do if it means getting your business. This becomes increasingly true as you scale up. Getting your business means more profit for a particular laundering service.
4. Scalability
Most businesses are run with the intention of eventually expanding. Similarly, some businesses may contract, either because that’s what is deemed best for their model or because of the necessity economic forces have put on the business. In either case, it helps for the laundry service a medical business is using to be scalable.
As the pandemic proved, it can be difficult to predict the forces that may affect the needs of a healthcare business. Scalability can be a useful safety net that some businesses can offer you and others cannot.
At Alsco, our operation is designed to be highly scalable. We’re able to do this for a variety of reasons, but one of the biggest is that we are a large operation. We have many machines and staff members that can quickly be assigned as the needs of our clients evolve.
5. Speed
A quality laundry service should be fast and predictable. In a medical setting, it’s critical to have a constant supply of thoroughly cleaned linens and other materials available for use. Having a room unavailable because it can’t be equipped with linens for even a day or two can be a major waste of space and potentially might represent a significant loss if a patient has to be turned away.
Even though we aim to deliver on time to all our clients, Alsco understands it’s especially important that medical clients stay equipped to handle their patients at whatever scale they might be operating. After all, in some cases getting materials might literally represent a difference between life and death, even if things are rarely that extreme.
Alsco’s Medical Linen Services
A cost-effective laundry solution is an important part of operating any business in the field of healthcare. It’s an easy factor to overlook, but clean linens are needed to provide a patient with the services they need at the quality they likely expect. Your laundry need will be constant and choosing the right service to help you meet that need is a major financial and business decision.
We’d love to talk to you or a representative from your company about how Alsco can provide you with medical-grade laundry service at a good rate. We’re a well-established operation with a solid reputation that can almost certainly help you meet your laundry needs regardless of the scale you operate at. Reach out to us today to learn more.
