Over the last year or so Gary Casey has been getting a lot of calls for parts. It got to the point where the tail was wagging the dog.

"I was getting as many calls for parts as people looking for machines," said Casey, a veteran medical equipment broker who was logistics manager for Magnaserv before he started his own company. Casey and Joe Vitrano have worked on many projects together and concluded that now is the time to launch a new business, A.C.M.I. Parts, a division of Vitrano's Apex Medical. The name also comes from Casey's firm, Comprehensive Medical Imaging.

A.C.M.I. Parts is an outgrowth of the brokerage business into the third party parts industry. A.C.M.I. is able to provide reliable MRI, CT, and X-Ray parts to customers at substantial savings over OEM pricing.
While maintaining its systems warehouse, A.C.M.I. will serve the growing legions of health care providers who are choosing to postpone upgrades of imaging equipment a bit longer in a difficult economy.

"With the economy in this downturn, money has gotten tighter," Casey told DOTmed News. "Companies that were planning to upgrade, say, to a 16-slice CT-- especially smaller rural hospitals and imaging centers--are now hanging on to their machines for another quarter or year. More people are sitting back."

He reported that even in deals where buyers are interested in used equipment, the seller may hang on for prolonged periods and require parts to keep equipment operational.

Currently A.C.M.I.'s warehouse is set up for mobile storage and is ready to expand for cold magnet storage. Eventually it will build test bays for CT and MR. Meanwhile, the parts business is expected to continue booming.

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