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John W. Mitchell, Senior Correspondent | June 04, 2018
From the June 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
“The more time we have to plan for it, the better it is more likely to go,” he said. “The secret is to plan, plan, plan – and plan some more to prevent surprises.”
Insights from the OEM
For equipment manufacturers aiming to get their system installed at a provider’s facility, picking the right company to partner with makes all the difference.
“Consider all factors before accepting a bid for existing equipment from a broker. There are [many] companies in this business with varied degrees of experience and technical skills,” said Edward Thieman, vice president of business operations for Virtual Imaging Inc., a Canon Company. “Depending on their experience, the success of the project can certainly be impacted in terms of timeline, safety risks and viability for partial or whole reselling.”
In planning an install, potential downtime and the entire cost of equipment ownership are factors that he thinks should be included when crunching the numbers. For instance, if one company can complete an installation in a week, how much revenue will a facility save over another company that takes four weeks?
Thieman stressed the importance of cybersecurity considerations and properly disposing of any equipment hard drives that may contain sensitive patient information. He recommends that that the biomed and IT managers be involved in any deinstallation project.
For equipment coming into the facility, ensuring interconnectivity with existing systems should be one of the first objectives.
“Companies that are good at this (interconnectivity) will advise you as soon as you ask,” said Thieman. “It shouldn’t take a week … to get an answer. This means they do not have a standard program in place.” Looking back over the roughly 1,500 imaging equipment installs in his career, Thieman recalls a particularly precarious project involving an MR magnet and some less-than-ideal geographical circumstances. At this job site, the crane operator had to build a 200-foot-long platform across an eight-foot-wide entry point into the side of a building.
“This was very uncomfortable because one wrong move and the magnet would have toppled onto a hill with about a 45-degree slope that ended at the bottom of a river,” he said. “The planning took three pre-visits with riggers to come up with the optimal solution.”
