Dealers of MRI mobile units are also hopeful that the Affordable Care Act, which would require an estimated 30 million uninsured people to obtain coverage by 2014, will increase the number of image exams performed annually.

"Theoretically, there are going to be another 30 million people insured and that would lead to additional scan volumes," notes Bob Bachman, president of Advanced Mobility, a supplier of specialty vehicles and mobile medical trailers.


Neally believes up until now investors had been in a holding pattern, waiting to see what the government would do with health care.




"People are starting to make decisions. They have a sense of what will happen with universal health insurance. The volume of medical imaging will grow if the government plan for insurance covers more people. Those who can afford to buy right now will do so because even if utilization is not going to be as high, demand will go up,” says Neally.

The upside of the downturn
While mobile medical unit acquisitions are sluggish, the transport, trailer refurbishment, maintenance and storage businesses have picked up.

"For transporting mobile MRI units, the economic slowdown is somewhat of an opportunity for us in the sense that you have hospitals releasing capital to invest in their own MRI unit. This has allowed us to transport those assets more efficiently," says Douglas J. Holmberg, executive vice president of operations, DMS Health Technologies, which offers mobile imaging rentals. "The downside is it has made the mobile industry more expensive, making margins lower."

Many equipment owners are maximizing their current investments by refurbishing equipment and trying to keep it on the road.

"There are substantially less mobile medical units being produced than there were three to five years ago. On the shared service provider side, they are moving their equipment more than ever before to optimize revenue," indicates Bachman. "Our business has been positively affected by the financial difficulty in the industry. Our focus is in the refurbishment and upgrade of the existing mobile units and less toward the newly built product. From the platform of refurbishment and upgrade we hope to take the next step into new unit manufacture as we see the business growing."

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