Imaging equipment for a regional practice

The brief

A regional orthopaedic and sports-medicine practice was referring its patients to imaging services an inconvenient distance away, adding friction to every consultation and sending part of its patient journey out of the practice. The clinical case for in-house plain X-ray and ultrasound was straightforward. The ownership case was not: capital constraints, limited regional servicing options and an accreditation pathway the practice had not travelled before. We underwrote and acquired the equipment and structured it for the practice to use clinically while we held and serviced it.

The difficulty

Regional settings make every equipment risk larger. A failed unit in metropolitan Melbourne can usually be attended same-day by a vendor engineer; the same failure in a regional practice can idle the imaging service for days and cancel every scan booked for that window. The practice also faced accreditation requirements for the imaging service — shielding, licensing and compliance documentation that had to be right before the first patient was scanned. And the financing structure had to suit a practice that preferred its capital to stay in clinical capability rather than in depreciating machinery.

What we did

We designed the program around distance from the outset. Service coverage was secured with a metro-based service partner working to a scheduled regional visit cycle — planned preventative maintenance, not wait-for-failure dispatch — augmented by remote diagnostics on the units we installed. The compliance program was run in parallel with installation: licensing, shielding verification and the documentation pack were assembled through the installation period so accreditation was achieved without a dead month between installation and first clinical use.

The commercial structure was written plainly: what the practice paid for, what service levels we committed to, and what happened at end of term. Replacement funding sat on our side of the table from day one — meaning the practice gained imaging capability without an unfunded lifecycle obligation attached to it.

The outcome

The imaging service was commissioned under accreditation and began clinical use on schedule. The practice kept its patients' imaging journey in-house, and the equipment has been maintained on its scheduled regional service cycle since.

From the other side of the program

This project applies our equipment investment discipline in a regional context. Read the next project, a facility operations turnaround, or talk to us about your practice's equipment decision.