From the March 2013 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Vendors often offer both ceiling- and floor-mounted systems, though by and large they’ve made different bets. Siemens’ zeego, one of the first C-arms designed specifically for the hybrid OR, is a floor-mounted system.
“I think the optimum is floor-mounted if you can get the flexibility right,” Kirk Ising, an analyst with KLAS who wrote a report on the interventional X-ray and hybrid OR markets last year, tells DOTmed News. “But there’s a lot of flexibility with the ceiling mount, which is why people have gone that route.”
Ceiling systems are, indeed, very common. Manufacturers have also tried to address some of the problems ceiling-mounted systems face in hybrid ORs. Philips, for instance, developed the FlexMove ceiling-mounted option for its Allura Xper FD. The company says it originally designed a prototype two and a half years ago in Germany, to appeal to customers performing TAVR procedures. The device, which lets the C-arm move laterally and longitudinally on ceiling rails, was cleared by the Food and Drug Administration for sale in the United States last year.
“In those TAVI procedures, people would have to adjust their positioning based on the equipment they had,” Philips’ Schapiro says. “What we saw with the FlexMove mounted on the ceiling, the system was flexible enough to move around the procedure.”
GE also is courting hybrid OR customers with its new, laser-guided Discovery IGS 730. Toshiba, which sells both floor- and ceiling-mounted Infinix-I C-arms, pushes as the “key differentiating feature” in the hybrid space its Work Rite technology and Access Halo. The feature, included on all Infinix-I systems, allows users to configure the C-arms to give 180-degree, unobstructed head-end access to the patient.
Training days
Cost isn’t the only concern for hospitals building hybrids. Many customers have reported some issues with getting staff up to snuff on new equipment, according to a KLAS report on hybrid ORs that came out in June.
The report, which surveys customers on how they like their equipment and vendor service, mentions that Siemens customers who use its Artis zee fluoroscopy system in the hybrid OR, as opposed to in a pure interventional suite, give it a lower overall performance score, partly because of training issues.
“There are two major challenges,” Ising, the report author, says. “The vendor’s new at it, and the providers are new at it.”
Overall, Toshiba placed first in performance scores for interventional X-ray in the report, partly because of its popular service, followed by Philips, GE and Siemens. However, KLAS says Siemens was seen as the “hybrid OR leader,” with the most hybrid OR installs and some of the most “cutting-edge” innovations. In its survey of 172 providers, KLAS validated 13 Siemens hybrid ORs for the zee and zeego, two each for Philips’ FD20 and Toshiba’s Infinix-I, and none for GE’s Innova 3100. GE’s brand-new hybrid OR-focused IGS 730 was at “too few sites” to be included, although the OEM did garner praise for the steady improvement in its scores over the past five years.
