Alliance Imaging Inc. Q4 2007 Earnings Call Transcript

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2008-02-21 10:17:08.0

Tags: Alliance Imaging Inc.

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

(Operator Instructions). Your first question comes from Darren Lehrich of Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Darren Lehrich

Thanks good morning. A couple of things here I wanted to cover, I guess just first with regard to the MRI price per scan. Could you just give us a little bit of commentary about the strength in pricing you saw in the quarter and what your outlook is on that?

Howard Aihara

Sure Darren, this is Howard. The MRI pricing as you know for the past two years, has been very, very stable in the low $360 range. Due to the acquisition of New England Health Enterprises which is the fixed site imaging center we acquired in the Northeast, those go all under retail arrangements which are higher price per scan than in our wholesale arrangement. So in terms of the pricing impact we saw a further favorable bump in price in the low $370 range.

Darren Lehrich

Okay. That's helpful. And then, I guess just wanted to get some commentary from you about how you feel the reception has been in the Radiation/Oncology Community and how you see your traction gaining in that marketplace, just kind of a big picture question?

Paul Viviano

Hi! Darren, this is Paul. I'll be happy to try to address your question. There is no doubt that we're still new at the business of Radiation/Oncology. We believe that it holds a lot of promise for us. Our strategy is been very overt. We have a number of hospital, customers and clients that we serve their imaging related needs that also have radiation therapy centers, many of which need new IMRT and IGRT capable linear accelerators. And so, our focus has been to work with those existing hospital customers to upgrade and replace their equipment. And we're beginning to gain traction, we've given guidance on how many centers that we'll develop this year and it's a significantly bigger number than last year and believe we're gaining some traction in this arena. We're also active in evaluating acquisitions of small regional providers like Bethesda that would be so community providers that we think fit our criteria, that also have in any circumstances CON and/or relationship with the hospital.

And so, we believe we're gaining traction. It becomes a meaningful part of our business. Howard reflected it's about 4% of our revenue for '08. We believe it would be a significantly greater part of our revenue in '09 and in future years beyond that, and we will kind of give you guidance year-by-year as the strategy evolves. So, we're very excited about the business, as there are a lot of opportunities and there is a lot of work ahead of us in order for us to be successful at this. We've provided some commentary to this 5 years approximately to generate roughly $100 million in our PET/CT business and it take us about the same amount of time to generate roughly $100 million in our fixed-site imaging center business, and we hope that, that same horizon could possibly translate into Radiation/Oncology being a similar size organization after five years as those two other new businesses that we started up. So, we're beginning to make some traction and have some impact on our company and in the business.

 

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