by
Diana Bradley, Staff Writer | August 20, 2012
From the August 2012 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
“The cost and availability of first generation equipment has been, and will continue to be, a challenge for health care providers and
parts suppliers,” says AllParts’ Cannon. “Given the high
cost of these systems, the corresponding proprietary parts
and very limited availability of trained engineers, health care providers will continue to rely on OEMs for the service and support of this equipment.”
Equally, sourcing parts for newer systems, particularly outside of the OEM arena, opens up another can of worms for customers looking to save money via alternative providers.
“A lot of customers buy the systems, and OEMs will sell them four to five year service contracts,” explains BC Technical’s Smith. “But the systems are so new, there are very few used systems on the market to pull parts from. And if there are used systems that are five-years-old, they are typically re-sold and not stripped for parts.”
Some industry professionals believe OEMs horde parts, making it difficult for anyone but their own contractors to service. But not all OEMs handle the refurbishment process in the same way, according to Sabine Duffy-Sandstrom, the U.S. vice president of refurbished systems at Siemens Healthcare.
“Some OEMs outsource all of their refurbishing work to a third-party vendor and some OEMS only refurbish certain imaging modalities,” she says. “Other OEMs – like Siemens -- have their own refurbished systems factory.”
Harvesting systems for parts is a key parts procurement strategy in this industry, according to ReMedPar’s Suffridge.
“I can certainly see why an OEM would find value in being able to dissemble trade-in systems for parts inventory,” he says. “The action would serve as an affirmation of the after-market parts model and go far in dispelling the common misconception that all OEM parts are ‘new’ parts.”
Along with the age of the equipment having an effect on parts’ procurement, certain components may prove a Herculean task to source due to sparse supply. Glas says that, at the moment, supplies of certain X-ray tube models are particularly running short.
“I think a lot of this is a function of the increased difficulty of acquiring quality used systems at the right price point to justify the system purchase,” he notes. “The same can also be said for flat panel detectors. I’ve noticed an increase in pricing on some of these systems, likely due to shorter supply and increased demand, basic economics.”
The Texas-sized migraines really begin when, like in the situation Glas noted, the parts in low supply are also the ones in high demand. And primarily, these in-demand parts tend to be from equipment that the OEMs are announcing as end-of-life.
