From the December 2015 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


For Oxford, the interim business is thriving. As for the fixed-state units, Vartanian says people are becoming familiar with the rules of the Affordable Care Act, and consequently entrepreneurial business is beginning to reemerge. “If you’re renting a building, you don’t want to invest $300,000 into a room you don’t even own, so you say, ‘You know what I’ll do? I’ll bring a mobile in.’”

Mobile MR leads the way
Most mobile imaging companies agree that MRs are the most highly sought units on the market. Meanwhile, hospitals with smaller budgets are still keeping mobile CT units active, and some more advanced hospitals are turning toward nuclear imaging with PET/ CT, or MCT.
For Oxford, Siemens and GE are the most highly sought MR system manufacturers. As for PET/CT, “We have three trailers and we are not building into that space because it doesn’t seem to be growing,” says Vartanian. There is some speculation that as PET/CT continues to expand its capabilities on the research front it will begin to gain greater ground among clinicians, but whether or not that shift has created any new market demand is a matter of some debate.

For Advanced Mobility, which works more directly with the OEMs than with the hospitals, the adoption of PET/CT has been apparent. “GE and Siemens both brought mobile PET/CT products to market last year and we have built several of each and have orders for several more,” says Bachman. “Philips has had a good run again this year with a 70 cm-bore MR product, [Ingenia] and hopefully the OEMs will continue to follow those paths of upgrading new systems with different modalities,” he added.

In addition to the primary modalities, Medical Coaches has recently delivered a few Hologic bone densitometry units and is also doing a fair amount of mammography units, according to Geoff Smith. Medical Coaches has also recently sold a few breast screening units that utilize CT. “There is a cup in the table where the breast goes in and CT will spin around it,” says Smith, adding that the image quality is extremely detailed, allowing for improved accuracy for biopsies.

The first mobile molecular breast imaging vehicle is currently traveling around Wisconsin between five Marshfield Clinic Health System hospitals. The imaging allows secondary screening for women with dense breasts for whom traditional mammography is not always conclusive. The mobile molecular breast imaging system is called the LumaGEM and is manufactured by Gamma Medica. Philip M. Croxford, the company’s president, says the system is small and light enough that installing it on a trailer was less complicated than it would be for more cumbersome modalities.

December 2015 Magazine

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