When it comes to Medicare reimbursements, the numbers look roughly like this: an analog mammogram is around $85, digital mammogram is $125, CAD is $15-$20, ultrasound is less than $100, and MRI is around $1,000.

The refurbished market


Since digital mammography is three times as expensive as film, there are a lot of hospitals and facilities that are looking to refurbished equipment to update their existing equipment. The same can be said for all imaging modalities.

"The refurbished market is good for us," McGinty says. "People are looking for a lower cost entry point in digital and certainly the refurbished market is a way to do it. We probably get 50-60 percent of what the OEM got upfront. In the case of Digitec, you get a 12 month warranty with the system."

Christopher Cone, CEO of Echoserve, a field service company and repair depot for ultrasound equipment and probes, as well as mammography equipment, says he sees a high demand for refurbished digital mammo equipment. "It's difficult to
find equipment on the aftermarket," he says. "I would guess that the vast majority of refurbished mammo equipment sold is still conventional analog."

Krista Kotrla of Block Imaging International, Inc. says the company has seen their mammography sales increase dramatically in 2008. "A large part of our Women's Health business in mammography is done overseas, or in Latin America where the demand for analog is still very high," she says. "Domestically the demand from end users has been digital and that is where the focus has shifted."

The overseas market

Many countries outside of the U.S. are also switching to digital mammography, but some are taking a while to get there. South America and Latin America, for instance, are still using analog.

"The Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries were early adapters [of digital]," Hall says. "If you start looking at other countries in Europe, say at France, Germany, and the UK, because of the way their healthcare systems are set up, they have just gotten approval for buying digital for the whole country. But it will be a multi-year process before digital mammography is dominant in any of those places."

McGinty says that in some countries, like Japan, they are going to computed radiography (CR), which is a step between analog and digital. "It's not as high quality as DR, but it's very good, and we find a lot of people using CR as an entry point."

The future of mammography

In addition to the modalities already discussed, there are some other things that could be making some noise in breast diagnostics in the next 5-10 years.

More Industry Reports