Your Guide to Medical Imaging Equipment

Nobody likes to place calls for medical imaging equipment service. We’d all be much happier if every CT, C-arm, or digital mammo we ever bought worked correctly, 100% of the time, for the rest of our lives. Unfortunately, we live in a world of wear and tear, acts of God, and outright boneheaded moments that create the need for maintenance and repairs. 

When these things happen, if you haven’t purchased a service contract to cover your equipment, you’ll be calling in service engineers on a time and materials basis. The price on this type of service can vary widely depending on hourly rates and parts needs. There can also be additional down time costs, depending on the engineer’s availability. 

While we do offer time and materials service and do our best to keep the costs to a minimum, we can’t honestly speak for other companies in the business. As a safeguard in these situations, here are some tips to help you make sure you’re getting the best value out of time and materials service calls.

Many is the time our service, parts, or engineering departments have been asked, “How can I know how much life is left in my OEC C-arm tube?” Considering the cost of a C-arm tube, this is a perfectly reasonable inquiry to make. Unfortunately, to put the common answer succinctly, you can’t know.

With that answer, we’ve probably managed to raise a couple of other questions. We don’t want to leave you hanging, so we’ll qualify our answer and tell you what’s to be done in light of it.

Need a C-arm tube now? Click here to request!

When speaking with customers about “refurbished cath labs” there are often questions about what the refurbishment includes. There are a number of imaging equipment vendors who offer refurbished systems, but many of them don’t really discuss what their refurbishment process looks like.

We can’t speak for the others, but below is the process we use at Block Imaging to return used cath lab equipment to OEM specifications for image quality and performance: