by
Olga Deshchenko, DOTmed News Reporter | March 28, 2011
From the March 2011 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
A Chicago-area hospital experienced an issue with a room’s RF shielding that cost the facility more than $100,000 and a year’s time to fix. The company initially hired to test the shielding told the hospital to remove the room’s windows and replaced most of the floor, but the artifacts on the MR images persisted.
The facility then contacted Shielding Resources Group Inc., to assess the problem. Company president, Michael J. Lahita, took one look at the scans and knew it was not RF related. His testing equipment confirmed his thoughts.
It turned out improperly loaded software was the actual culprit. “They had found out that a mandatory field upgrade was made to the software and the protocol changes were not relayed to the operators,” says Lahita.
Facilities put a lot of thought into choosing an MR scanner, and shielding experts agree that the outer shell protecting the multimillion dollar investment should get just as much attention. A wise shielding vendor choice can mean a difference between a stable profit stream and thousands of dollars in lost revenue. In this case, the hospital paid a hefty price to learn the lesson.
A matter of experience
The fundamental concepts of RF shielding haven’t changed much during the past two decades, but makeup of the market segment is a different story. Within the past five years or so, differences among shielding providers have split the industry into two camps – companies that specialize and companies that have chosen to diversify. Those specializing only provide RF shielding and those diversifying provide enclosures and various products and services for the MRI suite.
Having many service companies to choose from can be advantageous to hospitals shopping around for the best options, but this can also mean trouble if a facility concentrates too much on price and too little on experience. The low prices offered by some providers can be enticing, but in some cases, may cost more in the long run. “The flipside to [the low price] is because [such companies] can be here today and gone next year, they don’t give the end-user a lot of long-term stability for future support or dealing with problems or issues that come up,” says Ben Turner, vice president of global business development- medical, with ETS-Lindgren.
Every RF shielding company has had at least one project where additional involvement was required, explains Turner, an instance where experts had to go “above and beyond to resolve an issue” and ended up with significant expenses to be covered out-of-pocket to resolve the problem. “The smaller ‘mom and pops’ don’t necessarily have those resources and can’t afford to incur the additional costs,” he says. “Quite often, they’ll walk away from those problems, and if necessary, just close their doors and reopen under a different name. The larger companies have more invested and more at stake.”
