Walking into a big-box store and getting an eye exam or picking up prescriptions have long been amenities for shoppers. Now, women can add mammogram screenings to that list.
Sawtelle-based diagnostic imaging company RadNet Inc. last weekend opened a mammogram screening center inside a Walmart Inc. supercenter in Delaware – one of only a handful of such screening centers thought to exist in the nation. With this pilot project, Walmart shoppers can walk in and receive a basic mammogram screening.
“This pilot program with Walmart is an effort to bring mammograms to the people,” said Mark Stolper, RadNet’s chief financial officer.
RadNet currently has 366 diagnostic imaging centers in seven states: Arizona, California, Delaware, Florida, Maryland, New Jersey and New York. Most of these centers are separate storefronts. Patients using these centers can get mammograms, computed tomography – or CT – scans; magnetic resonance imaging scans, commonly known as MRIs; and ultrasound and other diagnostic imaging tests.
In recent years, the company also has developed and sold computerized systems to other diagnostic imaging providers. And in the past couple of years, it has integrated artificial intelligence algorithms developed at recent acquisition Deep Health Inc. into its diagnostic systems.
Superstore location
But the Walmart pilot project represents the first time RadNet has placed one of its mammogram screening centers inside a superstore. In fact, according to Stolper, nationwide, there have been only a handful of mammogram screening centers tucked into retail stores. One of those is a clinic operated by NorthShore Evanston Hospital that opened in 1995 inside a Nordstrom store in the Chicago suburb of Skokie.
Unlike its stand-alone diagnostic imaging centers, RadNet’s just-opened pilot mammography center in the Walmart supercenter in Milford in south-central Delaware offers basic mammogram screenings only, with no follow-up capabilities if the…
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