There’s no doubt that the sharing of services between UNMC and The Nebraska Medical Center has helped each institution’s bottom line, but there’s more to the shared services than monetary benefits.
“As we tie the campus utility infrastructure together, there are some improved efficiencies, but perhaps more importantly, there’s more redundancy and more safety,” said Del Lee, associate vice chancellor for business and finance at UNMC.
For example, Lee said, four different power sources now feed into the Med Center campus. Short of a major catastrophe, campus officials are able to keep power to the essential health-care services during power outages, while shutting off power in non-emergency areas.
“We can route power to places that need to have power, such as the patient units of the hospital,” Lee said.
The letter of understanding that the leaders of UNMC and The Nebraska Medical Center signed in 1997 stated that both institutions would seek to combine services when it was in the best interest of both parties.
Early on, combining some services was an obvious benefit. Each institution’s Mail Services were combined into one, as was Security. Those and some other combined services, such as Chemical and Radiation Safety, are managed by UNMC. Other services that were combined, such as Environmental Services and Fire and Life Safety Operations, are managed by The Nebraska Medical Center. Each service, Lee said, has an agreement between UNMC and the hospital, detailing how expenses and revenues will be handled.
“There’s no doubt that there’s savings by doing these things together,” Lee said. “For instance, in Mail Services, you’d have people delivering mail down the same hallway, in some cases. To do it separately would cost a lot more money.”