by
Joanna Padovano, Reporter | December 19, 2011
From the December 2011 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Dishman has observed that the technological trends of the sector seem to follow a cyclical pattern. “Wherever you’re at on the technology ladder, each type of system has a product life cycle—you just have to observe that and be sensitive to it,” he says. “At some point there will be a demand for the next higher-rung technology, and then you just have to tailor your fleet to be responsive to what’s being asked for. That’s kind of like a repeating cycle.”
One challenge that is more unique to mobile service providers—as opposed to the medical imaging sector in general—is the price of gasoline. No matter what the cost of fuel, medical trailers always need to fill up their tanks in order to drive from point A to point B. “Some of the fuel prices have come down for now, but as the fuel prices go up, it definitely erodes the margin as we’re moving these assets around the United States,” explains Richter.
Additionally, the unpredictability of nature is a constant challenge that creates hazardous driving conditions and makes it difficult for mobile service providers to maintain a perfect on-time delivery record. “We recently just went through a hurricane hitting the North East and a snow storm,” says Varcarolis, mentioning that there are a lot of logistics involved in the transportation of medical trailers.
Further down the road
“I think a lot of people thought it was only going to be a short-term type thing, but I think mobile’s going to be around for a very long time,” predicts Richter.
Photo courtesy of
DMS Health Technologies
“This year’s RSNA will probably tell a lot,” Smith tells DOTmed News in late October, a month before the Radiological Society of North America’s annual meeting. “We’ll find out what kind of modalities are out there right now, what they’re developing, what’s going to be mobilized, and what customers [will] want to take advantage of.”
Vartanian forecasts that there will always be a need for mobile service providers, but it is unclear how much the sector will be able to grow due to so many factors at play in the market today, from fuel prices to health care reform and its potential impact on imaging systems to come. “Some people say it could be positive, some people say it could be negative,” he says. “We don’t have the crystal ball.”
