by
John R. Fischer, Senior Reporter | August 27, 2018
From the August 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
In addition to expanding into specialties, ISOs are increasing their levels of professionalism by tacking on different certifications such as ISO 13485 or ISO 9001, in order to compete with OEMs and bolster their reputations as safe and quality servicers.
Such achievements have come about through mergers and acquisitions between small ISOs, a trend that has afforded them opportunities to cross-train and expand the skills of their staff into new areas.
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Manufacturer MVS departments are also pooling their resources with other entities and establishing partnerships with ISOs that allow them to meet service commitments in specialized areas while keeping their focus on the core areas of their service business.
Training programs such as GE's ultrasound class train
future engineers how to service equipment. Randal
Walker of Alpha Source Group, warns that technologies like
AI may disrupt these lessons and prevent students
from learning how to address specific issues.
“When the multi-vendors first started, they would jump in and want to control 100 percent of the service. What they realized is that there is a lot of small equipment in hospitals, where there may be tens to thousands of pieces, such as 4000 infusion pumps, for instance. Those are very, very thin margin, occasional touch pieces of equipment that they can use the staff for,” said Walker. “But then they say, ‘That doesn’t make sense. There’s somebody else I can partner with. I’ll give up a bit of margin to not have to deal with that much service.’”
Collaboration has also grown internally with the integration of MVS and OEM services like that of GE. “If you go back 23 years ago, we had different multi-vendor field engineers separate from our OEM field engineers. Today, we have one seamless team for our customers to call for quality support, regardless of the label on the equipment,” said Geoff Hunt, senior director of multi-vendor service operations for GE.
While MVS departments and ISOs are both committed to providing excellent service, Crothall’s O’Donnell points out that there is a fundamental difference in the way these two groups might view the job. “One criterion an OEM considers and measures when it takes on an MVS account is the conversion rate for those MVS sockets to the OEM’s sockets.”
