Just this morning I was discussing a potential client with a team member who stated a prospective customer was currently being serviced by an organization that “performed preventative maintenance” on every device within the physician’s office from thermometers to sterilizers, refrigerators to ultrasound systems. The comment was made that they “are more economical” than we are so we should lower our rates to match if we want the business.
Author: Matt Tomory
This article has touched on the American College of Radiology (ACR) requirements for ultrasound but I would like to dive deeper into the alphabet soup and look at the different organizations out there that encompass ultrasound accreditation.
The ultrasound market has been changing over the last decade due to the introduction of powerful, reliable portable systems with performance coming close to, and in some cases surpassing, traditional, console based systems. With these exciting new products come new challenges when it comes to maintenance and service.
The Philips iU22 and iE33 ultrasound systems are excellent general imaging, vascular and cardiology units that have gained a very large share of the market over the last 10 years.
Ultrasound image artifacts have many sources, both internal and external, and can be described in many ways but essentially they are areas of the image that have missing information (dropouts), static (non-moving), and dynamic (moving) artifacts.
One of the most frequent, and difficult, problems we encounter in ultrasound service are related to noise in images. This can occur in 2D, color Doppler (CD), pulsed wave Doppler (PW) or continuous wave Doppler (CW).
Ultrasound preventative maintenance sounds like a very basic and somewhat boring topic to cover. However, throughout my career I have seen many PMs performed or examined systems post-PM and have found the service to be inadequate at best.
Usually this column deals with the technical aspects of ultrasound support, but I would be remiss if I left out an equally important component of service which is the relationship and communications you need to establish with your customers.
Several years ago, we developed and began delivering a program on the advantages, mechanics, and pitfalls of migrating ultrasound service from the OEM to in-house engineering.
The American College of Radiology (ACR) has instituted several changes this year that affect how we as service providers ensure the Quality Control (QC) component of an accreditation application meets their new requirements.
