MPX Sales and Service, LLC out of Whitmore Lake, Michigan is celebrating 20 years in the mobile CT business. The company goes nationwide and into Canada, bringing scanners where and when needed by hospitals and clinics. The "park and lock" business has six scanners under lease right now.

"The customer may need a system for a month while they're doing a changeover to a newer system and they don't want to discontinue the CT. This gives them the ability to serve patients while they're refurbishing the room...a seamless transition from old to new," said Vice President Richard Dishman. "Sometimes there's a scenario where a hospital has an older scanner and they haven't decided yet what they're going to buy to replace it. But they have more throughput than they can really handle with the one system. They might bring a mobile in so that they don't have any shortfall."


The built-in obsolescence of CT technology ensures a built-in market for MPX's service. "There is always going to be some new development, a better performing piece of CT equipment. And as that happens, the demand curve will exercise itself and hospitals and clinics will desire to trade out what they have now, into the latest and greatest. That's what fuels our business. Because that flow of turnover is what creates the need for temporary, interim lease systems while these upgrade projects take place," Dishman observed.

DOTmed News recently reported on the 256-slice CT scanner at Johns Hopkins. While such cutting-edge technology is rarely installed at this point, it does point to accelerating innovation in the CT field.

"There has always been the theoretical construct that has eclipsed even the clinical aspect... It's a conversation between the clinical community and the people in R&D for GE, Siemens, Philips, Toshiba who keep coming up with newer, later, greater developments. That's what drives the market."

As long as people keep upgrading, MPX will always be busy.

"Sometimes we will have a higher technology system than what customers have been using. So they can rent ours for several months, test drive it and see if that is going to work for them. Then they might decide to buy a similar system later or go to something higher end or lower end," he said.

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