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With more than 2 million patient interactions every year, Parkview Health goes through a lot of linens, as you may imagine, and we depend upon Hospital Laundry Service (HLS) to provide us with a constant fresh supply. This valued organization recently celebrated its 25th anniversary, and it’s a great example of a partnership that was built to benefit healthcare providers across the region. In fact, HLS is co-owned by Parkview Health and Lutheran Health Network.
Until August 1992, Parkview and Lutheran were operating multiple laundry operations at their individual facilities, which was very inefficient. Their respective leaders came together to form HLS and build one large laundry facility, and the two health systems each still have 50 percent ownership of HLS. In addition to having a laundry in Fort Wayne, HLS has staff working in the hospitals full time to handle the linen distribution throughout the facilities. The company has approximately 100 employees, with 15 located in Parkview facilities. They do laundry for hospitals and physicians’ offices across the region, and they have approximately 250 individual delivery points. This year, they expect to do 13 million pounds of laundry – that requires a lot of detergent!
Bill Jones, general manager, Hospital Laundry Services, offered us the following fun facts about just how much it takes to support a health care system.
