by
Brendon Nafziger, DOTmed News Associate Editor | December 20, 2012
The mobile MRI only made it in time because of the extra effort on the part of its earlier leaseholder, a 113-bed community hospital in Chelsea, a town west of Ann Arbor, Mich., where Vartanian's company is based.
"You have one community helping another," Vartanian says.
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Chelsea Community Hospital, which was renting the mobile MRI, had a seven-week contract for the equipment. The hospital, you see, was moving house. Its diagnostic imaging department, the emergency department, ICU, therapy services and inpatient medical-surgical beds, among other units, were being transferred to a new building that was scheduled to open on Dec. 17. The hospital needed the mobile MRI while its own fixed MRI underwent the lengthy process of being taken down from its original location and moved into the new building on campus, where it would then be reassembled.
When Vartanian approached the hospital asking if they could release the MRI early so it could arrive in NYU in time, they knew it would be tough. It meant they would have to get the MRI department in the new building ready earlier than planned, and all without an interruption in imaging services for their own patients. But after considering the matter, the hospital decided to help.
"We knew it would be a bit of a stretch for us," says Kathy Brubaker, executive vice president for patient care services at Chelsea. "However, when we thought about everything the patients and staff and community of NYU have been through, we said, 'We can handle this. We can make it work.' So we did."
Late Thursday night, the MRI arrives.
The mobile unit scanned its last patient in Chelsea Wednesday night, then early Thursday it was on the road to New York. Meanwhile, that same day the hospital's fixed MRI was up and running and scanning patients -- four days earlier than expected.
"I've been doing this for 22 years now with my own company, and this is one of the better projects we've had to get involved in," Vartanian says.
New home
The unit in question is a three-year-old Siemens Avanto 1.5-Tesla machine. As NYU is now down from three MRIs to one, Vartanian says they needed a newer, more powerful unit with high throughput capacity.
"It's a really good mobile scanner," Brubaker says.
