The healthcare sector has been finding it to be a Herculean task to provide healthcare to the poor. There are a couple of good reasons for this apart from the ever growing population that comes up with a diverse range of health conditions.

  • One, the resources available to the government to cater to such ever growing demand is scarce
  • Two, this poor populace consumes a large part of that scarcely available resources and 
  • Three, the businesses identify it to be unviable commercially.

All in all, the government is left with lots of challenges to face in financing healthcare. It is due to their inability to create more affordable and accessible healthcare systems that should ideally have three basic things:

  • Scale or reach
  • Permanence or being multi-generational and
  • Well supported by different justifiable financing mechanisms. 

All these three are important aspects to focus on but it seems the finance part is the most critical one to tackle. This cannot be handled without having a look at the probable innovative strategies that will help them to create a health care system that is not only efficient but is also affordable and accessible to this large poor populace.

Inevitably and invariably, most of the players in the health care sector, major as well as the minor ones are therefore on the constant look out for different funding mechanisms that are over and beyond the traditional borrowing route.

Influence of alternative lending

The alternative money lending sources such as Liberty Lending and a host of others has brought in significant advantages for the health care sector as well as providing the poor population with a lot of benefits in turn. It not only allows the doctors and the other medical professionals to purchase practices or build upon but also allows the practices to expand their existing infrastructure.

It is no surprise that the alternative lending sector is now a trillion dollar industry and this is certainly not a typo. Yes, it is a trillion and it is a typically very, very big number. In general, alternative lending is a broad church that offers a large number of diverse products and in different forms and from different sources. You may have come across different terms such as:

  • Online Lenders
  • Alternative Financing
  • Payday Lending
  • Title Loans
  • P2P or Peer to Peer Lending and
  • Marketplace Lending.

All these alternative lending platforms allow borrowers to procure loans much more easily making loans far more affordable and accessible to them. These funding mechanisms usually follow a much easier and more flexible loan approval policy as compared to the traditional banks and other financial institutions. This makes the disbursal time for these loans much shorter.

They usually have much more flexible criteria for eligibility of these loans. Most importantly, it is the unsecured nature of the loans offered that makes these more easily available to the borrowers.

Healthcare equipment finance

You can avail these loans from these alternative sources if you are a doctor or a medical professional for a diverse range of purposes. You can use the fund for:

  • Starting your own medical practice
  • Expanding your existing medical practice or 
  • If you are planning to open or expand a hospital.

Most importantly, these loans will enable you to buy all those health care equipment that costs a fortune. In short, these loans will help you to go ahead with your business and practice with much greater confidence keeping it upgraded with the times and the needs of the health care industry.

All these financial products and solutions are tailored to suit your specific needs and budget as well. Whether you are a doctor, or own a diagnostic center or nursing home, you need for purchasing medical equipment will be varied. For example, you will need funds for:

  • Purchasing a new medical equipment
  • Refinance on the existing lien free medical equipment or 
  • For that matter of expansion of your existing healthcare facilities.

The features of these loans and the alternative sources can be summarized as they are the sources that provide such facilities and benefits to:

  • Nursing homes
  • Medium and large private hospitals
  • Diagnostics Centers
  • Pathology labs
  • Skin clinics
  • Dental clinics
  • Eye centers
  • Medical practitioners and 
  • Doctors.

The different types of loans available from these alternative sources can be used for different purposes such as for:

  • New medical equipment financing
  • Ancillary equipment financing
  • Refinancing of used and existing equipment
  • Financing projects for brown field expansion
  • Balance Transfer of the existing term loans
  • Hospital Infrastructure Financing
  • Operating lease for medical equipment and 
  • Professional loans to the doctors.

All it means is that these loans will enable you to tide over the short term glitches and at the same time plan for your long term endeavors. 

Maintaining a cash flow

Just as using a line of credit, these loans will help any type of health care practice to maintain a cash flow. Maintaining cash flow is not an easy job whether it is a medical, dental, skin or veterinarian clinic because it is very unpredictable and can be highly inconsistent. There are several reasons for this such as:

  • It can take a long time, often weeks or months for the patients or their insurers to make the payment for the treatments received and this is beyond the control of the practice and 
  • The business cycle or the time frame between the patient treatment and the receipt of payment can be variable.

The longer is the business cycle, the harder it will be for a clinic to manage their cash. When you have limited cash your business cannot run efficiently or deal with the unexpected exigencies such as failing of equipment which needs repair or replacement.

In such a situation, such alternative funding can be of great help to any health care service when the receivables are not easy to some by or far off into the future. These loans available at a paltry interest and can be paid back easily within the stipulated time limit which can be a few weeks, months or years, according to your affordability.