Stanford Hospital's Cost-Cutting Innovations: Employee Ideas Save Millions (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Stanford Hospital has come up with a unique way to cut costs. It is asking its staff for suggestions. Thuy Vu on the ideas that are adding up to millions in savings. You've heard the depressing news, sky-high gas prices, bad economic times. So Stanford Hospital decided to try something new to save money. It turned to its employees.

Speaker 2: They're the people who use the product. They're the ones that will come to me and say, you know what? We use this item, but half the time we don't use this piece of it.

Speaker 1: One of the freshest ideas, trash. Specifically, how it's collected. An employee noticed the big dumpsters were rarely full. Switching to smaller dumpsters and a reduced trash collection schedule saved the hospital $87,000 in the past year. That much?

Speaker 2: That much.

Speaker 1: Did that surprise you? Yes. Another idea, de-linting only towels used in the OR, and not all towels, including bath towels. That idea alone cleaned up in savings, cutting costs by nearly $150,000. The fountain of ideas keeps coming, hundreds of them. There was a hunt for unused computer lines, phone jacks, and pagers. Somebody else suggested finding a cheaper, yet still reliable brand of gloves. All the ideas have saved Stanford a whopping $14 million.

Speaker 3: What we've done so far is great, but we can definitely expand upon that and make it better.

Speaker 1: Chris Bizard and his coworkers even found a way to make money by recycling the platinum tips on the special catheters they use.

Speaker 3: When we are done with these procedures, we will cut the platinum tips off and have them sent to a recycling program. So this is a bunch of what we've got. This is pretty much for the last month.

Speaker 1: So far, the recycler has paid $18,000 for all that platinum. Stanford Hospital plans to use all the money saved and made to help offset the cost of that expansion. In Palo Alto, Thuy Vu, CBS 5.