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Healthcare Insights

Most common types of hospital RFPs

Hospitals issue requests for proposals (RFPs) to begin the vendor selection process for many different types of projects, products, and services.

What do hospitals issue RFPs for?

Hospitals use RFPs to announce purchasing plans and outline the specific requirements they might need. RFPs help hospitals protect the purchase and allows them to review multiple bids to find a suitable price point. The different types of RFPs a hospital might issue include:

How are hospital RFPs monitored?

The Definitive Healthcare HospitalView product tracks federal healthcare RFPs from the System for Award Management website and collects non-federal RFPs by monitoring state, local, and healthcare entity websites for RFPs and purchasing requests.

Between January 2022 and September 2025, we recorded more than 117,000 hospital RFPs. Clients across the healthcare industry can use information such as hospital RFP data for more targeted sales and marketing efforts. For example, a technology company might review software RFPs to understand hospitals’ current IT priorities.

To learn more about the types of services hospitals need, this list breaks down the most frequent categories for issued hospital RFPs between January 2022 and September 2025.

Top 20 most common hospital RFP categories

RankRFP categoryCount of healthcare RFPsExplore dataset
1Professional Services37,896Explore
2Medical/Surgical Equipment or Supplies18,453Explore
3Maintenance/Facility Management15,609Explore
4Construction - New Building/Renovations/Design7,936Explore
5Non-Clinical Supplies4,754Explore
6Laboratory/Blood Related4,120Explore
7Pharmacy3,216Explore
8Physician Services2,980Explore
9Transportation Services2,810Explore
10Insurance2,688Explore
11Technology Services2,606Explore
12Technology Software2,384Explore
13Radiology/Medical Imaging1,863Explore
14Technology Hardware (incl Telecom)1,719Explore
15Consulting - Strategic/Financial1,420Explore
16Food Services1,219Explore
17Real Estate1,172Explore
18Electronic Health/Medical Records443Explore
19Coding/Patient Billing/Revenue Cycle303Explore
20Transcription Services240Explore

Fig. 1 Data is from the Definitive Healthcare HospitalView product. RFPs and hospital purchasing data are from a variety of sources and updated daily. Accessed September 2025.

What is the most common hospital RFP type?

Hospitals most often issue RFPs for professional services, which includes a variety of healthcare-related areas such as supplemental provider staffing, laundry services, and janitorial services. Professional services RFPs account for 33% of the hospital RFPs analyzed.

Medical/surgical supplies are the second most common RFP type, and the remaining top 10 categories include:

Learn more

Read about how companies like medical suppliers and technology vendors use data from Definitive Healthcare every day.

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