Siemens wins 15-year €132m medical imaging contract in Spain
11 August 2010
The Ministry of Health of the Spanish region of Murcia has
awarded a managed equipment services contract worth €132 million to
Siemens Healthcare to supply up-to-date medical imaging technology for
15 years.
Within the framework of a public–private partnership, Siemens will
provide the Cartagena and Mar Menor hospitals with more than 100 imaging
systems, including computed tomography scanners, mammography
systems, and ultrasound systems.
Siemens will ensure that the hospitals work with state-of-the-art
technology for the next 15 years. This includes both maintenance and
a guarantee that the systems will be replaced in predefined
intervals with the newest model of the respective product line.
Siemens Financial Services developed the financing solution for the
initial equipment and for the regular technological replacements.
The new Cartagena and Mar Menor public hospitals in the Murcia region
will be completed by the end of 2010 and will have a total of more than 1,000 beds. However, the Ministry of Health faced a
considerable challenge when it was required to provide the latest
medical technology for two large hospitals all at once.
For this reason, the authorities looked for a private investor.
"With public private partnership tenders, we aim at advancing the
quality of our health services and simultaneously improve the
relationship between costs and benefits,” said Maria Angeles
Palacio, Health Minister of the Murcia region. “For this project,
the Siemens solution proved to be most competitive both in
technological and economical terms.”
The contract’s linchpin is the "Managed Equipment Services" (MES)
business model that Siemens Healthcare has already applied to
various successful projects — especially in Great Britain, where the
publicly financed healthcare system largely depends on the
commitment of private companies.
With MES contracts, customers have the benefits of using the latest
technology while they need not worry about system maintenance and
management. Simultaneously, they can count on planning reliability
for a fixed period of time.