[Sponsored] Company Showcase: Summit Imaging

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Summit Imaging® is a technology-enabled ultrasound and mammography imaging equipment service business. We provide our customers with the highest quality repair services and replacement parts so they can remain focused on their primary job of delivering excellent patient care. Since 2006, Summit has leveraged a unique combination of sophisticated component-level repair capabilities, software development skills and an exceptionally customer-focused team to meet the needs of our customers and their patients. Our products and services help Healthcare Technology Managers (HTMs) increase equipment uptime at their facilities at a significant savings compared to other options. Summit truly values collaborating with health care facilities that seek to enhance access to quality medical services at a competitive cost. Customers consistently report that the more they work with us, the more savings they realize via cost reductions and improvement of key HTM operating metrics.

Summit Imaging provides product support and service for ultrasound equipment in the following areas:

• Ultrasound transducer repairs and replacements
• Ultrasound system replacement parts
• Best in class diagnosis and installation technical support
• Detailed hands-on service training for technical personnel

In response to health care facilities requests, Summit has expanded the suite of solutions it offers into mammography equipment. We now offer mammography equipment support in the following areas:

• Mammography digital detector plate repair and replacement
• A comprehensive inventory of mammography system replacement parts
• A knowledgeable and responsive technical support team

How does Summit Imaging fit into the Healthcare Technology Management (HTM) Industry?

Summit Imaging believes that our customers, sometimes with our help, have the ability to keep their imaging equipment running in tip-top shape. Our goal is to enable HTMs to service their medical devices much faster and at a lower cost than traditional, full service-oriented options. Our ability to help health care facilities optimize and improve their equipment management programs has become an extraordinarily attractive and lucrative alternative for our customers. Often, in-house HTM and field service teams must focus on responding to a variety of failed medical device alerts with limited bandwidth to diagnose the faults. Summit Imaging’s technical support team assists HTMs with the technical knowledge and guidance needed to properly and quickly diagnose faults, remove faulty components and install high-quality, warranted replacement parts they can trust to quickly return their systems back to service scanning patients. And, at Summit Imaging, we continue to develop new technologies and methods to repair these complex systems in order to meet the needs of our customers which represent some of the largest health care networks in North America.

Summit Imaging has a very unique operating model. What influenced how Summit Imaging operates?

Summit Imaging’s humble roots began performing electronic component repairs on computer systems in medical devices. This was during a time when devices were transitioning away from analog and toward digital technologies. This experience helps us hone a unique skill set recognized by our earliest customers as an effective way to help them reduce their service and maintenance costs. This further led to opportunities to partner with well-known and highly respected health care organizations in tackling larger and more complex challenges. Summit Imaging came to understand that the needs of these organizations revolved around rapid access to high-quality replacement parts resulting in industry leading HTM performance benchmarks for time and cost savings.

Summit Imaging worked closely with these customers to align our operations and business model with our customers’ needs. Looking back, we now understand that this was the beginning of an industry shift toward health care facilities developing internal HTM service departments. We are grateful to these early customers for leading us to operate in a manner that best served their needs, both then and now. This model of increasing reliance on in-house support services at medical facilities has now become the norm rather than the exception. Today, Summit Imaging continues to evolve in response to our customers’ quest for greater operational cost savings alongside improving patient care.

What role does technology serve to Summit Imaging?

Technology has fundamentally changed the HTM industry and leading-edge technology development is a philosophy deeply embedded in Summit’s culture. To us, it is one of the very best methods to reduce diagnosis and repair times as well as streamline installation time and complexity. Simply stated, our strategy is to resolve complicated problems and package solutions in simple-to-use form factors for health care facilities to deploy. These technologies do require significant development resources in order to deliver seamless, high-quality solutions. Some of our solutions have been transformative for healthcare facilities and how they operate their HTM programs. Some of the most promising outcomes include: higher yield on first service success, reduced HTM service time, lower total cost of fault diagnosis and repair, and increased patient care capacities. In the past, health care facilities’ repair options were limited to full-service solutions. Today, HTM groups can service their equipment with the support of an organization like Summit Imaging and realize savings ranging from 60% to 80% relative to traditional service options.

Summit Imaging, alongside its health care facility customers, will continue trailblazing more support options for ultrasound equipment, mammography equipment and other medical devices that contain complex electronics. Future growth in the HTM industry will require ongoing development of innovative solutions that drive increased productivity and efficiency. There is a generational shift underway in the HTM industry. As the experience level of engineers and technicians decreases and workloads increase, the need for powerful, technology-based solutions like ours becomes even more vital.

How do you provide your technology to HTMs?

Much of Summit Imaging’s technology is focused on repairing the sophisticated electronics of medical devices that are readily available when HTMs need it. Our core value proposition is delivering high-quality replacement parts that HTMs can install and, in the process, extend the mean time between failure, preventing additional unnecessary service calls. HTMs become very frustrated when they return to a recently repaired device only to find that the replacement part has failed again. It is abundantly clear to us based on our extensive experience with the healthcare technology management community, that the most precious resource for HTMs is time. We strive to help our customers fix things quickly, but most importantly to fix it right the first time.

Summit Imaging has invested significant resources to ensure the products we sell and help our customers install last well into the future in order to prevent unnecessary service calls. In 2015, the company earned its initial ISO 13485:2016 certification for its Quality Management System (QMS) and has successfully passed annual certification audits every year since. Summit Imaging has deployed its QMS through integration with its cloud computing-based, Enterprise Resource Planning system to help us manage, streamline and enhance our operations. The impact to our organization has been dramatic and our customers have really benefited. The application of 14 years of experience and advanced analytics tools has allowed Summit to collect and aggregate data, to utilize that information for better planning a customer engagement and to improve the quality of the products and technical support we provide our customers. Summit Imaging enjoys the industry’s best quality of product and best technical support metrics with a 93% accuracy rating for first time diagnosis amongst HTMs. We are proud of our performance and remain committed to continue to improve for the benefit of our customers and the patients they care for.

What does the future hold for the HTM industry?

Society needs healthcare technology management to continue advancing in order to deliver better patient care while simultaneously containing rising health care costs. One of the focus areas must be an emphasis on health care facilities delivering high-quality patient care at a sustainable cost. This is a direction we must pursue because without this HTM movement, we are exposed to the risk of ballooning costs, making quality health care out of reach to increasing segments of our population. One of the best strategies available for health care facilities seeking sustainable growth is to lower costs while concurrently maximizing their revenue generating opportunities. With health care facilities moving away from fully outsourced service models, it is clear they will increasingly need new solutions to expand their service capacity. Summit Imaging has always believed it is critically important to contribute to the welfare and evolution of the health care industry and we are excited to continue to evolve our current tools and develop new technological solutions to help health care facilities be in the best position to care for patients in need.