18 Saratov hospitals are suing the Moscow supplier of X-ray machines at once

2022: Claims against Siriussv for the supply of X-ray machines without digital radiography devices

On August 16, 2022, it became known that the mass purchase of X-ray equipment for hospitals in the districts of the Saratov region turned into a lawsuit and seems to be a big headache for the regional Ministry of Health.

Doctors claim that they were supplied with the wrong devices that they asked for. The Moscow supplier Siriussv LLC, for its part, assures that it has not retreated from the documentation and is ready to force buyers to take the equipment in court. The regional arbitration upheld the position of the doctors, but the defendant filed appeals, which 12 AAS will consider only in late August - early September 2022.

From September to November 2021, the regional arbitration received 18 lawsuits from the Central Regional Hospital to Siriussv. Medical facilities require the supplier company to fulfill its obligations and deliver the X-ray installations of the proper quality. The main claim to the equipment, explained in the press service of the arbitration court, in the method of obtaining X-rays.

All hospitals ordered mobile digital X-ray machines "MobiRen-4MT-A," which were immediately digitized, and instead received analog machines, for which X-ray film is needed. As a result, hospitals began to massively abandon the equipment supplied, while the defendant argued that their actions were illegal and began to file counterclaims, trying to get the equipment accepted through the court. The main argument of "Siriussv" is the absence in the terms of reference of an indication of the presence of an image digitization function in the devices.

18 Saratov hospitals are being sued with the Moscow supplier of X-ray machines
Photo: MobiRen-4MT-A mobile X-ray machine

As of August 16, 2022, the arbitration satisfied the requirements of Perelyubskaya, Dukhovnitskaya, Novouzenskaya, Ozinsky, Ekaterinovskaya, Lysogorskaya, Atkar CRH. In all cases, the court rejected the counterclaims of Siriussv and decided to oblige the company to fulfill the terms of the contract and recovered from it for delay in obligations. The supplier, however, hopes for an appeal and massively appeals the decisions of the first instance.

From the materials of the cases it can be seen that the MobiRen-4MT-A devices, which are Russian-made equipment, can be equipped with digital radiography devices additionally, at the request of the customer. But the supplier decided that if the technical part of the documentation does not indicate the completeness of the device, then it is possible to supply them without this additional module. To resolve the issue on the merits, the plaintiffs had to involve experts to establish exactly whether the equipment delivered to the hospitals meets the terms of the contract or not.

From the materials of the courts, it is clear that the hospitals received equipment, firstly, not on time, and secondly, only with a partial package of documents, and the documentation went by mail. But there is more to come.

"The warranty card for the delivered goods is filled out without specifying the serial number, the commissioning date, which is a prerequisite for refusing to fulfill the warranty obligations," the court said in a lawsuit filed by the Lysogorsk Central District Hospital.

Siriussv"" is not a manufacturer, but X-ray machines only a dealer. the Russian The company JSC ("Medical Technologies Ltd." MTL) produces the equipment of the model involved in the case. Its production is located in. The Moscow region website of the manufacturing company says that the MobiRen-4MT-A X-ray machine is a digital tent mobile X-ray machine.

Radiologist AWS, which includes MobiRen-4MT-A devices from MTL

MobiRen-4MT-A provides high image clarity with minimal beam load. The digital workstation, which the device is equipped with, allows you to process the resulting images directly in place, achieving the required quality without reshooting and re-irradiating the patient, "the annotation explains.

It is this device, as the experts involved in the court concluded, that is not included in the delivery kit. In the basic configuration, the device delivered to the Bald Mountains is not a digital system, the examination concluded, it can be supplied with both a digital system and a film developing machine.

The X-ray equipment that became the subject of the lawsuit is quite expensive. Most of the contracts were signed in the amount of 1.4 million rubles. Those hospitals that needed more equipment, namely Atkarskaya, Petrovskaya and Sovetskaya CRH, signed contracts worth 2.8 million rubles.

Purchases were carried out centrally, immediately for all hospitals. The tender with an initial price of 53.4 million rubles was announced in April 2021 by the State Procurement Centralization Agency. There were three applicants for it, Siriussv, Argus-CS LLC and A.T.Medika LLC. As a result, the Moscow supplier was chosen as the most inexpensive, he offered to supply equipment for 40.1 million rubles, reducing the original price by 24.8%. But cheap, it doesn't mean successful yet. There was no increase in equipment in hospitals, and the issue moved to the judicial plane.

In addition to the Central Regional Hospital of the Saratov Region, Siriussv supplied medical equipment to the Chelyabinsk Region, Sakhalin and for the needs of the Russian Guard. Moreover, the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation in 2020 collected 130 thousand rubles of penalties from the supplier. The company paid it without waiting for the proceedings to be completed.^[1]

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