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Recent Trends and Legislation Accelerate Full DR Acceptance
By Tony Fioriglio
A recent report released by market research firm Technavio and reported on MedGadget projected that the global DR market would increase by nearly $4 billion by 2018. According to the information detailed by MedGadget, the report, “Digital Radiology Market — Global Industry Size, Market Share, Trends, Analysis, And Forecasts 2012–2018,” predicted a market expansion with a compound annual growth rate of 5.4%, starting in 2012, when the market was valued at $9.7 billion, through 2018, when the market is projected to be worth $13.3 billion.
And really, this surge in popularity should not come as a surprise.
As nations around the globe continue to develop both academically and financially, their access and demand for medical care grows; with that comes the implementation of this technology.
In North America, which has had access to DR for the better part of a decade and controls approximately 41% of the global market per MedGadget, and in the United States in particular, the reasons for the DR expansion are somewhat different from those of developing nations.
Replacement and Reimbursement Are Key Factors
While the transition from film and CR to DR is not new, manufacturers have spent the past decade or so, since the introduction of DR, working toward refining the technology to, among other things, make it smaller, more mobile, and easier to use.
Demand for this updated technology is clearly strong, as evidenced by the seemingly daily announcements of hospitals and imaging centers installing new equipment.
In recent months, manufacturers across the industry have been working to keep up by announcing updates or launching products, whether at RSNA 2015 or in the months since. A small sampling of these recent updates include companies such as Rayence, Konica Minolta, Carestream, and Fujifilm, among others.
Beyond the regular replacement of outdated film and CR units that have simply aged out of use, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2016 has strongly incentivized providers to make the switch to DR if they have not already done so. Contained within the law is a section regarding the Medicare reimbursement for image providers that explicitly states that reimbursements for film images will decrease by 20% starting in 2017, and CR images will see their reimbursements fall by 7% annually from 2017 through 2022, at which point the reimbursement rates will begin to drop by 10% annually.
Long story short, facilities will quickly reach a point where it will no longer be financially viable for them to use or maintain film or CR units. Even before the recent changes to reimbursement, the number of CR units still in use has been declining for years. At least some of that decrease, however, was likely due to the lack of new CR and analog options coming into the marketplace to replace old or worn-out equipment. With the clauses added to the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2016, though, it looks more and more likely that DR will completely take over the market in the near future, quite possibly sooner than many originally thought.
— Tony Fioriglio is assistant editor of Radiology Today.
