by
Kathy Mahdoubi, Senior Correspondent | April 30, 2010
The price is right-almost
Flat panel technologies are still very expensive, but the price is finally coming down. In the past five years, a two-plate DR room has moved in price from $500,000 or $600,000 to the neighborhood of around $400,000. Single plate systems have come down in price by as much as 30 to 40 percent. That's not limited to DR. On the CR side, prices are falling just as steeply.
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"The price point of digital technology has come down, for both DR and CR, which is healthy," says Rick Sbordone, vice president of sales for Edge Medical Devices. "It's bringing the technology to a larger market segment, and as prices come down, more people can adopt it."
DR in the ER
One of the places where DR has really taken off is in the ER, where everything is time sensitive and procedure volume is high. DOTmed met with Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust superintendent radiographer, Steven McDonald, who presented a scientific presentation titled "DR in the ER" at the 2009 RSNA Annual Meeting. He had some interesting things to say about digital radiography and how it is changing the game in the emergency room.
The Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospital is an 800-bed acute care and city center hospital. They use Carestream's fixed DR 7500 radiography system. Radiologists can have the patient in and out in 30 seconds from a procedure point of view - but it's not always about speed, says McDonald. If they have five minutes allotted for that patient, the rest of that time could be spent caring for the patient and allaying fears. McDonald relayed a recent case of a patient who fell 70 feet after a construction crane had collapsed.
"Can you imagine that poor guy - you're walking off with your CR cassettes or analog images and you're putting them through a processor and he's left on his own, lying there, neck strapped down, not knowing what's going on," said McDonald. "We don't have to do that anymore and that's what makes it exciting in the ER."
But is DR cost-effective? The Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospital has had DR for a little more than two years. The hospital used to have three X-ray rooms and a CR system with conventional X-ray tubes. They were seeing 22,000 patients per room annually. Now they have taken it down to a two-room DR set-up, and are seeing 33,000 patients a year, a major uptick.
