by
Lauren Dubinsky, Senior Reporter | August 13, 2018
From the August 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Varex also gets business from CT scanners at the tail end of their product life cycle.
“Most OEMs know that we build replacement products,” said Jonaitis. “Rather than building all the way to the end of life cycle of a product, they truncate it and buy our tube to finish out the scanner life cycle.”
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Chronos Imaging is also doing well on the business end of things. In mid-June, the company secured the sale and shipment of 100 CT tubes from the facility in Aurora.
Piconi said that this achievement couldn’t have been possible without the experience and capabilities in product realization and quality operations performance of his employees.
Like Richardson, many of the Chronos employees have between 20 to 30 years of experience in the industry.
Given the previous announcements in June 2017 that Dunlee planned to shut down the Aurora facility, Chronos needed to articulate a very clear vision, strategy and execution plan for the future that people could rally behind and get excited about.
“We believe we made a good start, but are more excited about what we will be delivering in the future,” said Piconi.
A future with more remote monitoring
According to GE Healthcare, more than 40 scans are lost, on average, due to one tube failure. In addition, tube failures lead to an estimated $64,000 in lost revenue annually.
At the most recent Radiological Society of North American annual meeting, GE showcased its Tube Watch service, which remotely monitors tubes and predicts failures before any disruption occurs.
The service is currently available for the Revolution EVO CT scanner and Optima 660 with Performix Plus tube.
“Using Tube Watch plus physics-based models for the components in the tube, we are able to help to predict impending failures, enabling our customers to schedule proactive service of the tube or replacement of the tube prior to the tube failing during an inappropriate time in a hospital,” said Carey Rogers, chief engineer at GE.
GE built a number of features into its CT systems to extend tube lifetime, including warmups before exams and calibrations that ensure the system is working properly.
But a CT tube is still a consumable and does fail after some period of time, said Rogers.
Tube Watch’s proactive part delivery and service scheduling service could potentially reduce downtime by up to 75 percent.
“We are always trying to improve the reliability of X-ray tubes and generators, with a focus to minimize any interruptions to the customer,” said Rogers.
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