ISOs are often run by former OEM employees and also have field service engineers who previously worked for manufacturers, but there may be a huge difference in the quality of service provided between one ISO and another. Choosing the right one for your needs will require research.

Any partner should be ISO certified and in regard to parts distribution, should have test procedures and bases in place for quality analysis, according to Dave Neffinger, sales director at DirectMed Imaging. His company, which supplies over 60,000 MR and CT parts for GE HealthCare, Siemens Healthineers, Philips, and Canon/Toshiba scanners, and trains ISOs on these machines, has ISO 13485:2016 certification for MR and CT parts and service and offers fully tested parts such as specialized MR coils.


“To figure out if a parts provider is reliable or not when you're walking into a facility and you see that they have a test base and lots of technical expertise in the building, you know you can rely on that provider to give you tested working parts,” he said. “If you do a site audit, and they don't have those things, likely they're not as reliable as the others.”

Additionally, providers should know which MR makes and models an ISO specializes in.

“We only service Siemens Heathineers equipment and primarily MR systems,” says Knight. “That limits the kind of scope there may be in servicing other modalities and other OEM-made solutions. There may at times even be modalities and equipment that are impossible to service unless it's by the OEM.”

A new era of ISO service
Cuts to reimbursement and thinner margins mean some providers are entertaining greater risk as a way to offset spending, while providers with full-service coverage may feel pressure to maintain higher throughput and utilization of their MR equipment to justify the cost of these packages. For that reason, service providers are offering more customized contract options.

“If your equipment is over five years old, a ready supply of spare parts is on the shelf ready to go in the secondary market, knowing that parts will be available for same-day or next-day delivery, depending on your geographic location, is something that most independent healthcare providers don't understand,” says McCormack. “They don't know that an independent service provider even has access to the parts for same-day delivery in the market.”

The need to assess whether ISOs can provide quality servicing and parts replacement will also continue to be a necessity, says Neffinger. “When it comes to parts, it's all about quality. And obviously, saving money for the customer would be the second-best thing there, but it's all about getting that customer up and running.”

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