Nevertheless, challenges remain. "On the PET side, CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) has been working hard to limit physicians' self-referral in nuclear medicine and PET. That area had been segregated from the rest of diagnostic medicine and physicians were able to invest in centers and refer to those centers. Although nothing has changed just yet, CMS may tighten those rules so that physician ownership of those centers would be less attractive. "Long-term if those rules change, instead of physicians owning centers, entrepreneurs will own them," he predicted.

Recently, Webster was able to help several geographically isolated free-standing centers in communities around the U.S. that couldn't support $2 million acquisitions of PET scanners. The community health centers were sending people up to three hours away to get scans and wanted to bring PET to the local community. Webster installed refurbished PET scanners with other pieces and provided connectivity solutions that allowed the community to fuse images between MRI, CT or PET to optimize equipment, bring down prices and improve access and service in oncology, neurology and cardiology. In addition, he provided marketing and on-going tech support.


Webster has lots of great advice for customers. "To those who are already in PET: Look long and hard at what you have before changing and upgrading and taking on more debt than you can handle. To those who are looking to get into PET: Don't be put off by what the major vendors are saying, but in fact, do that baseline business analysis and be able to honestly say to yourself we should do it, we shouldn't do it, we can do it, we can't do it, whether it's the technical component or the financial component," he said. "We don't tell anybody to ... go out and do PET imaging.... We do the analysis and projected results to help them understand and be able to measure that risk."


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