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Special report: Refurbishers & ISOs move ahead with the expanding ultrasound market

by Olga Deshchenko, DOTmed News Reporter | May 23, 2011
From the May 2011 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine

For imaging resellers, recent economic conditions have encouraged bigger facilities that traditionally looked to OEMs to explore how refurbishers and ISOs might meet their needs.

In December 2010, MedPro Imaging reported selling 400 ultrasound units and transducers in a single month. Major health institutions, such as the Cleveland Clinic and USC University Hospital, purchased ultrasound equipment from the company.

“In the past five years, our refurbished [equipment sale] numbers have gone through the roof,” says Keith Rubenstein, MedPro’s managing partner and senior vice president of sales and marketing.

Ultrasound advances
Even in an economic downturn, innovations in ultrasound continued to expand. The technology’s potential to open up new markets has even earned it the nickname “the ‘stethoscope’ of the future,” Joseph Bjorklund, vice president, sales and business development, with Ultrasonix Medical Corp, wrote in a statement to DOTmed News.

Ultrasound is playing a bigger role in areas such as vascular access, guided procedures, preventative medicine and ultrasound-guided fine-needle aspiration, said Bjorklund.

Among women’s health care providers, 3-D and 4-D ultrasound technology is very popular. “It’s making its way into radiology, but it hasn’t exploded yet,” says MedPro’s Rubenstein.

In addition to hospitals, refurbishers have also seen a higher demand for ultrasound equipment from pain management offices, general practices and sports rehabilitation facilities. “Physicians and patients like the fact that ultrasound can provide imaging without exposure to radiation,” wrote Bill Cowan, vice president of Liberty Diagnostic Services, in a statement to DOTmed News.

Compact leads the way
One of the fastest growing sectors in the ultrasound market has been hand-held systems. In 2010, compact systems outpaced the overall ultrasound market and totaled $276 million in United States sales, according to a 2011 report by Klein Biomedical Consultants.

In 2010, sales of compact ultrasound units (defined in the report as systems that weigh 14 pounds or less) grew by 21 percent from 2009. The report also predicted that the compact ultrasound market will continue to grow by 13 percent over the next five years and total $505 million in 2015.

The compact ultrasound leader is SonoSite, which holds 42 percent of market share, followed by GE Healthcare and Philips Healthcare. Together, the three OEMs hold a market share of 78 percent, according to the report.

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