Who Select Devices

A friend outside the field laughed and said physician device choices were not mine to count.

But I remember specifying furniture and devices that were not the clinical team’s first choice but did the job. The space did not allow anything else.

So I went to find out who actually selects what in a hospital FF&E list — furniture, fixtures, and equipment, if you are not from the field.

Clinical teams. Healthcare planners. Architects and engineers. Equipment planners. Everyone is involved. But in what proportion?

I went looking for a number. A study. A benchmark. Anything anyone had counted properly.

Nothing.

So I tried to estimate it the only honest way I could find. Break the FF&E list into categories. Assign each category to whoever owns it in practice. Count the line items.

Clinical teams have a say on specialty-specific devices. The equipment a cardiologist insists on. The instrument a surgeon will not operate without.

Most everything else is centrally procured. Exam beds. Cardiac monitors. Standard ward equipment. The facility planning team makes the decision alongside a few central clinical representatives. The rest of the clinical teams inherit what was agreed.

The split also depends on how you count. By line items, the facility planning team dominates. By dollar value, one MRI outweighs every chair in the building.

The majority of decisions on a hospital FF&E list are made by a team laypeople did not expect.

But I still do not have a number I would stake a claim on. If you have done this count on a real project, I would genuinely like to know what you found.