From the August 2019 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


“It didn’t take long for word to hit the street that there was a company in Tennessee that bought all of the scraps from the refurb center,” recalls Ed. “Having access to those parts at a price that was affordable was the game changer that allowed [ISOs] to compete with the OEM service business.”

These companies were hiring engineers who had GE experience, and now that they had access to repair parts, they could introduce a training element to spread those capabilities more efficiently throughout their staff. This knowledge was proliferated through people like Bill Burke and other seasoned engineers who Ed describes as “super stars” in the ISO market.


As training capabilities became more robust, the independent medical equipment service market went from a few small companies to a booming industry. Around 1990, Ed and his family founded their own parts repair company and called it Reliable Medical Parts or ReMedPar.

The company was created entirely off the sale of a single product, an array processor from the GE refurb center that Sloan paid $39 for and sold to R Squared for $62,500. Ed hired a couple of engineers from the digital board repair department that had been laid off by GE and started working on CT and X-ray.

As the 20th Century came to a close, ReMedPar was still going strong but the windfall profits from the early days had given way to thinner margins and greater competition.

A lot of moving parts
“In the mid-to-late 90s the OEMs were exerting a great deal of pressure in the market to attempt to minimize the effect of the third party service and equipment providers,” said Sloan. “For example, GE acquired Innoserv (a combination of Mediq and R Squared) the leading independent service group and National MD a service provider located in Ohio.”

If you remember those original ISOs then you probably also remember Comdisco. For a few decades, the computer leasing company was one of the biggest business success stories in the country. By the mid-90s the multibillion dollar company had established a Medical Equipment Group that was overseen by a fellow named Chip Halverson.

When Comdisco decided it wanted to get rid of the medical unit, Chip and Ed explored ways they might combine it with ReMedPar. In 1999, together with John Bardis and Galen Partners, the three of them formed MedAssets as a parts and refurbished equipment company.

During the second year of operation, John Bardis changed the direction of the company to a GPO and sold ReMedPar to Three Cities Research to support COHR (Masterplan). GE Capital wound up with the Comdisco medical business in 2002 and shut it down a year later.

August 2019 Magazine

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