RadNet, the outpatient imaging company, has bought Kern Radiology Medical Center in Bakersfield, California. No financial details were announced.

“Patients will get better service because there will be more physicians around,” Dr. Girish Patel, who sold nearby Truxtun Radiology Medical Group to RadNet in 2010 but has remained in charge of the group, told The Bakersfield Californian in Kern County, California.

“Even with similar physicians, we can, you know, divide the workload better,” he added.

RadNet has grown, since it was begun by six doctors in 1981 as a single imaging center near Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, to become a publicly traded company with “341 locations, more than 500 radiologists and approximately 7,100 employees,” according to its web site. It stated that it is the biggest firm of its kind in the country, with regional networks in New Jersey, New York, Delaware, Maryland, California, and Florida.

Kern Radiology began in 1968 and was owned by nine doctors, and now has four offices. The local firm has contracts with Dignity Health, including its Bakersfield Memorial Hospital and Mercy, according to The Bakersfield newspaper.

In 2015, when RadNet acquired Diagnostic Imaging Group (DIG) for about $56.7 million, CEO and president Dr. Howard Berger stated, “Diagnostic Imaging Group has been one of the premier operators in our industry, and has been in business about as long as RadNet,” adding, “with this transaction, we establish a relationship with approximately 20 radiologists who currently service the DIG facilities through a contracted affiliated professional services entity.”

More recently, in late 2018, RadNet again made a move in the greater New York market, when it acquired Medical Arts Radiology, which has ten imaging centers in Long Island, New York, providing MR, CT, PET/CT, X-ray, ultrasound, bone density and interventional procedures. The ten centers annually generate approximately $40 million of patient revenue, perform approximately 180,000 imaging procedures, and add roughly 350 full-time and part-time employees to its roster.

“After building a significant presence in the neighboring boroughs of New York City, including Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx, we have been interested for some time in entering the Long Island marketplace,” Berger stated at the time.

RadNet's impact on the imaging market is “disrupting,” according to The Motley Fool. In late 2018, when it reviewed the company, it noted that, “The expensive overhead associated with hospital-based radiology ... makes the industry ripe for disruption,” and pointed out that “RadNet is taking advantage of that opportunity” through a combination of its hundreds of freestanding offices and deal-cutting with hospital systems to provide on-demand staffing and off-site diagnosis, plus tech to enable easy imaging sharing via the cloud.

“What they're doing is partnering up with health centers and hospitals to create freestanding units where they're majority owners, and maybe these health centers own a small minority interest in them, with the goal of being able to deliver the same service faster, better, at a lower cost. And so far, it seems to be working. They've got 341 different outpatient imaging centers that they're running right now. About 86 of those are held in joint ventures with health system partners, but they're looking to try and boost that to 50 percent over time,” Motley Fool's Todd Campbell pointed out.