The Playbook
A lifecycle approach to medical office refreshes that protects patient flow and prevents emergency pricing.
1) Refresh on a lifecycle (not on panic)
- Laptops: ~3 years
- Desktops: ~5 years
- Network/infrastructure: planned lifecycle, not failures
Rule: If you refresh only when things break, vendors control the timeline and the price.
2) Build a refresh runway
- Know what gets replaced and when
- Know what it will be replaced with (at a category level)
- Know who does the work (internal vs vendor)
- Know what happens to cabling/network when devices change
Rule: If you don’t know when something will be replaced, you’re already late.
3) Budget as a system
- Per-seat / per-provider cost
- Hardware cost
- Network cost
- Software + licensing (EHR, imaging, security)
Medical reality
Downtime can delay charting, interrupt scheduling, and slow billing. In clinics, that cost often beats the cost of the hardware.