At Genesis, a national sales manager was hired to focus solely on cryorefrigeration system service opportunities, such as cryorefrigeration system maintenance agreements or a parts exchange for self-sufficient centers/groups.

"We launched the remote magnet service offering ColdTRAC, to proactively monitor key parameters that are critical to averting any adverse helium boil-off problems and ensuring the highest cryogen efficiency of the magnet," he says. "This is done on a VPN system directly from the MR equipment room to the operations center of GMS."


ColdtTRAC brings a "cryogen guarantee" to its customers that gives them assurance they're not on their own should they not be alerted to a failure incident.

"Unlike other monitoring systems, we created a monitoring service that alerts us to an initial first stage problem so that we can make repairs before any helium loss," Hoffman says.

The company has also been adding significant depth by hiring new senior executives-all longtime industry professionals-to lead operations, logistics, sales/marketing and development.

Hoffman explains although they compete against the larger OEMs, business has been doing well as they offer some fresh options.

"With the strong focus on health care budgets today, we can give a very good competitive advantage to imaging centers and companies," he says. "We have significantly increased our inventory of cryorefrigeration components that are ready for immediate shipment to all MR suites globally, which greatly increases the response time for repairing a MRI system before any major helium loss or, worst situation for an imaging center, downtime due to degradation of imaging quality and system availability."

MagnaServ, Inc. recently began offering vacuuming and re-commissioning of MRs after investing nearly $20,000 in the equipment necessary.




"We had a couple of magnets vacuumed down and we used another company and by the time we paid the bill we thought, 'we could do this ourselves' so we bought the equipment, and had a basic understanding of how to use it. We had some old GE magnets here and broke-in the vacuum to work on them and it was quite simple once we got the basics of it down," said Jeff Gregory, MRI manager for Stuart, Fla.-based MagnaServ.

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