KLAS: Toshiba stands out on annual medical equipment rankings
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“While Toshiba makes products that are very similar to the other vendors, they continue to do extremely well with their customers in the industry and that’s garnering them new business,” Brown said.
The report ranks eight key market categories including CT, digital mammography, MRI, digital x-ray and ultrasound. There has not been a great amount of movement within the top seven rankings over the past four years; however, FujiFilm Medical Systems and Carestream Health continue to edge other vendors out, closely following Toshiba, noted Brown.
This year, the report divided the ultrasound section into general diagnostic, hand-carried and cardiology areas based on the increasing specialization of the modality. “Instead of looking at ultrasound in one segment, we wanted to isolate it into specific areas that made the most sense in terms of provider feedback and demand,” said Brown, who noted that this area may be broken out further in future reports. Two segments also new to the report this year were anesthesia cabinets and pharmacy automation: IV robots.
In the mammography segment, Hologic took the number one spot. “Over the past six to nine months, we have seen Hologic’s performance improve, which has garnered them a noticeable gap in the mammo space,” explained Brown, who noted that this year, GE Healthcare and Hologic have separated in this segment with FujiFilm acquiring the number two ranking.
A noticeable change this year was Konica’s Minolta performance in both the CR multi-plate and single plate segments, Kirk Ising, research director of medical equipment and imaging informatics at KLAS, said in an interview. Konica did not take the top spot in either category. “[The company] has had a good position lately, but it’s not there this year,” shared Ising.
In addition to holding the top ranking overall, Toshiba also stayed solid in both the CT and MR segments this year, noted Brown.
Carestream and FujiFilm ran a tight race in the digital x-ray market; each company had multiple products making the cut. In both the 3T and open MRI segment, Philips Healthcare continued to do well, and Philips holds the number one spot in the cardiac ultrasound segment, he noted. GE and Siemens Healthcare are once again very close with strong product performances, especially in the CT and MR space, noted Brown.
The yearly Best in KLAS report for medical equipment is based on 2,000 interviews every month with hospitals and providers, who rank the equipment on 25 different dimensions.