By Caylie Moore, Features Editor
On Wednesday, Sept. 2, VuePoint Diagnostics held a ribbon cutting ceremony to celebrate the opening of its new office in Gadsden, located at 241 S. 3rd Street, Suite B.
Based in Birmingham and currently operating across 48 states with around 250 employees, CEO Mark Emanuelsen first founded the family-owned Alabaman company in 2011, and family has been at the forefront of VuePoint Diagnostics ever since. The opening of its Gadsden office on Sept. 2 simply illustrated — once again — just how important family is to the team behind it.
“Mark founded this company in 2011, and so he was pretty excited to bring our call center and billing center to Downtown Gadsden. [His mother] Susan lives here, and his brother lives here,” Darcie Raines, the Plant Service Director, stated. “It’s a family-owned company.”
The company, a “locally owned leader in portable imaging,” specializes in delivering high-quality, patient-focused diagnostic services to the patient, rather than forcing the patient to come to where the services are.
“VuePoint really consists of two divisions: one is what we call ‘on-demand radiology,’” Emanuelsen explained. “We work with nursing homes, assisted living facilities, home health agencies, and homebound patients. You call us for an X-ray and ultrasound, and we come to your house, your facility, your nursing home to do it.”
Emanuelsen stated that the other division included health screening for Medicare members, something that he wanted to get the word out about.
“Those can be eye exams, mineral checks, things like that. We don’t really have much competition here in the state, so a lot of our work is educating people about what benefits they have access to.”
“People on Medicare don’t know that they can have people coming into their homes to perform our services,” he stated, emphasizing that he wanted to help change that.
The ribbon cutting ceremony, packed with dozens of local residents, featured a door prize giveaway including a $50 Mater’s gift card and a gift basket filled with snacks from The Alabama Gift Company — local businesses that spelled out VuePoint Diagnostics’s commitment to the community in Gadsden.
Towards the end of the ceremony, Emanuelsen himself — as well as guest speakers like Kay Moore, Director of Downtown Gadsden Inc. — gave short speeches to those in attendance, expressing just how thankful they were for the new, mutually beneficial relationship between the company and the city.
