Medical Equipment Fraud

Hello,

As a field engineer I have come across many strange things in my time, but this one seem so odd I had to investigate further.

It seems there are medical equipment companies using a new scam to get customers to buy new equipment. Here is how it works: You call a company looking for service on your older Ultrasound system or any medical equipment, they say sure, we can repair that for you but it requires us to pick up your unit and transport it to our shop for proper diagnosis. Well then after days or even weeks go by and still no repair, they finally call (or worse, you have to call them to find out where your equipment is), so then they proceed to tell you your ultrasound or other equipment is to old to repair, parts are not available, etc. But guess what? Its your lucky day! Because they just happen to have another machine that they can sell you at a really good price.

Now, you would think this little trick would never work on medical professionals, but in fact it seems to work quite well, and we have met many nice customers that had fallen to this trick. The fact is, in my 30 years of servicing medical equipment, i have only had a few pieces of equipment that were un-repairable, and they were 25 plus years old and needed to be done away with anyway. And even then, if the customer insisted, i could have found a way to repair it and calibrate it to factory standards, and i usually tell them so.

Any medical equipment 20 years old or less can be repaired and usually for quite a bit less than when it was new, maybe 60 to 80% less. So the rule is, before you let any company run off with your equipment and hold it hostage, while they decide they don’t have the knowledge or resources to repair it, or they just want to scam you into buying whatever used equipment on there floor, do some research, the real service pros can repair virtually any medical equipment or at least be honest and say they do not have the expertise or proper equipment to repair your machine properly.

Keep this in mind, in 26 years of servicing hundreds maybe thousands of ultrasound systems, i only removed one system from the customer site, and that was due to a factory defect and it went back to the factory for replacement. Removing large medical equipment like Ultrasound , X-Ray, CT, MRI, Mammography, etc for in-shop repair, is not normal practice, just ask any manufacturer like GE, Philips, Siemens. Be safe! always question, always research, listen to your gut feeling.

Nils Nilson: Director, Senior Engineer, BMET