Take a picture, it will last longer, as the saying goes. As Rafal Zieba, CEO of Nuclear Medicine Associates, might say, “Take a nuclear image, it will help your doctor better understand your heart condition(s).”
Nuclear imaging---what was once the province of prescient science-fiction movies is now a highly-specialized service provided by Zieba’s nascent company, Nuclear Medicine Associates. NMA provides an advanced procedure known as myocardial perfusion imaging to six cardiologists and primary care physicians across Florida. MPI is also known as a nuclear stress test that helps physicians determine any heart conditions by assessing how blood flows through the heart muscle. NMA’s imaging equipment is mobile via a van.
The impetus for NMA began a couple of years ago, when Zieba’s father suffered a stroke.
“He had a stroke when he was 51,” he said. “So that kind of turned me on to the whole nuclear medicine field, and in particular, nuclear cardiology. [Nuclear cardiology is] basically trying to catch at an early stage patients [who] have any type of blockage going on, so it doesn’t lead to a stroke, or it doesn’t lead to a heart attack.”
Zieba noted that in a sometimes Byzantine healthcare system, weeks or even months can go by before patients see a cardiologist to whom they were referred by their primary care physician. Zieba said that NMA quickens that process by traveling to physicians to perform its tests.
NMA’s traveling team of just under 10 employees consists of nuclear medicine technicians, registered nurses and a stress technician. The company has an office hub in New Port Richey, with plans to eventually expand across the state.
Zieba chose Tampa Bay as NMA’s home for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the area’s robust market for MPI.
“As the state gets more folks down here, they’re not 20-year-olds; most of them are going to be 40, probably over 60,” he said. “Those are the patients we’re trying to help. Those are the folks [who] need to constantly check on their heart to make sure that they’re doing okay, that there is no blockage going on.”
NMA launched last December without any venture capital, and is expected to make $300,000 in its first year of operation, Zieba said. NMA competes with Georgia-based Digirad, a publicly-traded company.
In the short-term future, Zieba hopes that his company will open office hubs in Jacksonville, Naples and around Miami. In the long-term future, Zieba is open to the possibility of NMA expanding out of the state so long as such expansion would not weaken the company’s close relationships with physicians.
“If down the road, we could figure out a really good model to leave the state but still give excellent service, then that would be nice, but that would take a whole lot of work,” he said. “We [don’t want to be] some big corporation where all of a sudden, we’re not really looking at the patients, we’re just looking at the numbers. That’s something I don’t want.”
In the meantime, Zieba will carry on with a purpose that he gained as a result of his father’s stroke, as he hopes to reach others to prevent the very fate that befell his father.
“For me, helping out folks and making sure they don’t end up like my dad having a stroke at an early age, or a heart attack, if we could prevent those things, and get them help before it happens, then that’s a win-win for everybody,” he said.
