Your Guide to Medical Imaging Equipment

Before I talk about the intricacies of C-arm service agreements, I have a question for you. Would you rather:

A) Have a cavity filled, or B) Sit down and read a service agreement in its entirety- including the fine print?

Given some of my past experiences with formal agreements and contracts, I might actually be inclined to get the cavity filled. There always seems to be something in all that paperwork that one doesn’t quite catch or understand fully- and it comes back to bite you in the end. This is precisely why I am writing this blog.

Your current service agreement may not cover everything that you think it does. Generally speaking, C-arm service agreements cover the cost of replacement parts, labor, and travel. They reduce risk and can end up saving you a significant amount of money. There are, however, some limitations to what is covered. Let's uncover some of them now.

The manufacturer tells you your CT scanner needs 2 preventative maintenance (PM) visits each year. If your facility owns an MRI, the recommendation is 4. All the other modalities you may be using have their own PM frequency schedule too.

But is that really necessary? Is it really that important to do ALL of them? What about a CT PM every nine months? Or 3 MRI PMs a year?

To answer these questions succinctly: You really should do preventative maintenance as often as the OEM recommends. Here’s why:

If you manage any kind of healthcare facility, you already know that OSHA requires you to train your team in bloodborne pathogen (BBP) exposure prevention and accidental exposure response. What you're probably wondering now is how much you should be paying for that training.

The good news is that there are BBP training options that can fit literally any budget. The not-so-good news is that some of them take more work than others. Below, we take a look at what content is included in several options as well as the time and effort involved to administer them for compliance.

If you work around X-ray equipment, you've been there: radiation saftey training. It probably wasn't convenient, it probably took longer than it needed to, and you probably got reminder emails every week for two months to make sure you were at the session. As inconvenient and moderately annoying as all this was for those of you who were simply attending, we're willing to bet it was FAR more inconvenient for the administrator who had to put it all together.

Fortunately, there is a way for everyone to get the training they need to be safe and to be compliant with state and federal regulations while side-stepping all the problems of traditional radiation safety courses: Online radiation safety training.

Legislation, reimbursement rates, research and development- with so many factors at play, the imaging equipment market is constantly changing and, along with it, so is the imaging equipment service market. Although it is impossible to know for certain how the future will pan out, we can look at current trends and begin to develop an idea of the direction the market is headed. Read below to learn about the three biggest changes we see coming in the next few years.