To remind himself of how far his occupation has come in a short time, Roger Faselt, ’92 BS Radiological Sciences, just thinks about ultrasound machines he lugged about for house calls. The cumbersome machines, weighing about 100 pounds each, resembled a box on a dolly. “I would literally have to disassemble the machine, take it up the stairs, put it back together, do the test, and disassemble it again,” he says.
Five years later, Faselt and his back are thankful that the machines have radically changed in such a short time. “Now it’s the size of a laptop. I can put it under my arm, and it’s more sophisticated.”
Faselt founded Quality Medical Imaging in 2001 to serve home-bound patients needing ultrasounds, radiography, and other diagnostic services. As an experienced technician, he’d seen the upset that traveling to a medical appointment could cause, but the mobile tests then available lacked quality.
“Doing a good quality exam can significantly impact a person’s health,” he said. “If the technician doing a test or X-ray doesn’t do a good job, it doesn’t matter how good the interpreting physician is.”
The son of a schoolteacher, Faselt planned to be an ultrasound and X-ray instructor. Then the entrepreneurial urge struck. “I thought I’d do what I know,” Faselt says. He came to Las Vegas in 1989 to work at Sunrise Hospital. Soon he was the supervisor of the radiology department and taking evening courses at UNLV.
Good health care depends upon understanding the field, Faselt says, and the best way to gain that understanding is through education. He credits his study at UNLV as having helped him keep abreast of developments in imaging technology. He also looks to the university’s radiography program as a source for employees.
Faselt recently moved into a new office to accommodate the growth in business. The office has a sleek, modern feel that is upstaged by the sophistication of the equipment used for mobile services. The ultrasound and X-ray machines there cost upwards of $100,000 each. The cost of the technology can be prohibitive, especially for a new business. But, Faselt adds, more than the bottom line is affected by the choice of technology. “In my mind, you can’t think of it just as a business,” he says. “There are lives and emotions involved. There are consequences to a medical business that you can’t put on a spreadsheet.”
