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The future of imaging equipment service contracts

by Lauren Dubinsky, Senior Reporter | May 12, 2017
Donal Teahan
From the May 2017 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine

Donal Teahan, senior director of practice development in the radiology department at NYU Langone Medical Center, predicts that OEM service contracts will eventually evolve into what he calls “uptime contracts.”

Uptime is more important to him than the cost of service. That’s because it drives patient satisfaction, quality of care and efficiency as well as hospital operations in the imaging department.

“A service contract assumes that my equipment has to be down at some stage,” he says. “At some stage [the equipment will fail] during patient hours and we deal with that, but there are so many ways to proactively monitor a system now that you should be able to limit scan hours downtime.”
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Teahan believes that OEM service departments will have to change how they manage service hours on equipment. He thinks that will involve proactively monitoring the equipment as well as the environment it’s in.

The OEMs offer remote monitoring for their imaging equipment, but the technology only monitors the equipment itself. For example, Teahan argues that the environment, including power, temperature, humidity and the chilled water supply, should also be monitored.

When an MR fails, a great deal of time is usually spent determining if the cause is the equipment or the environment, says Teahan. If the manufacturer monitors the chilled water supply, for example, it can prevent the MR from failing by alerting the hospital if it’s outside of the acceptable temperature range.

“Since a significant proportion of my hard down problems with equipment are caused by the environment, it would seem logical that the manufacturer would want to proactively monitor that,” says Teahan.

“It is not enough for the hospital building management system [BMS] to track problems. We need an integrated approach that puts the equipment and environment data in one space. This way we can proactively predict problems or respond rapidly when issues do occur.”

He adds that it would be simple for the manufacturer to build that monitoring capability into its equipment. But he has been in talks with them about this concept for the past two to three years and says they “haven’t gotten the message yet.”


Teahan argues that the manufacturers’ approach toward preventive maintenance also needs to change. Currently, they send an engineer on separate days to perform preventive maintenance on each piece of imaging equipment throughout the year.
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Jose Morillo

Upgrade service vs.Cost.

May 19, 2017 07:36

Surely nexts years equipment manufacturers will include E.M. (Enviroment Active Monitoring) in its units as a sell tool. After all, such inclusion is almost free for them. The need tecnology exist and is easy to include in manufacturing hardawre & software production.

The real challenge is to include this options in a pre existing devices WITHOUT a high cost for owner or us.

Venezuela has a terrible electrical sytem. Voltage rise and down suddenly ahead the recomenrd limits of the most of equipments. In CT cases often I connect a line supervisor that active the door open circuit of the device to cut operation of tube but not turn down equipment. Operator, after verify it is not an actual door open situation can shut off the equipment in the right way. this prevent anode remain spinning.

UPS units are excesive expensive for us now due ur economy but small units that can work in stand by condition are still affordable. So, these inits take control of a stand by equipment to make sure the shut down process without x ray operation .

We had been to turn creatives due actul situation of the country

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