TechNation | Company Showcase: Tech Knowledge Associates

Tech Knowledge Associates (TKA) was formed in 2012 when St. Joseph Health System (Southern California, Northern California and Texas) decided to spin the Clinical Engineering program out into a commercial enterprise called The Innovation Institute. Since its beginnings, TKA has achieved success by positioning itself to provide highly cost-effective CE/HTM services for members of The Innovation Institute and others.

TechNation recently interviewed TKA President George Hampton to find out more about the company.

Q: What are some advantages that your company has over the competition?

Hampton: Our model is to provide a strong local presence and to integrate into the culture of our clients. We work to build a strong ethical relationship with our clients at very reasonable prices. Our goal is to honor our Catholic heritage by working to lower our client’s CE/HTM expenses through aggressive pricing and strong teams.

Q: What are some challenges that your company faced last year? How were you able to overcome them?

Hampton: We have suffered from difficulties finding technicians in the Northern California market. The cost of living is very high and there is a lot of competition for employees. We have created an apprenticeship program that has allowed us to attract people who might not have all the education to be a full-fledged technician. We train them, direct their education and work to groom them to learn our way of doing business. We have had several people work through our program, and some have even moved into management.

Q: Can you explain your company’s core competencies and unique selling points?

Hampton: Our core competencies include:

• Full Spectrum Services: We cover the maintenance of everything from electronic thermometers to radiation therapy units. We provide our clients with flat billing on all of these items and take all the catastrophic risk.
• Cultural Integration: We seek to build a relationship with our clients where our technicians are seen as co-workers and family within the clinical environment. We believe our services are a partnership and we desire to contribute to the public identity our clients work so hard to create.
• Technical Expertise: We believe in a high level of factory and alternative training for our technicians. Our philosophy is on-site experts with factory support is the best scenario for maximizing uptime and containing cost.
• Price Point: TKA prices our services to compete with proficient internal CE programs. We apply cost-to-value benchmarking to monitor our costs and target performance that rivals internal programs, unlike our competitors who compete with manufacturer price points and other expensive outsourced programs. More…