ECRI Institute used its Selectplus User Experience Network, a service that helps medical technology purchasers with vendor and product information, to gauge MRI operators on what they thought of vendors’ image quality, coil selection and setup, ease of use, patient throughput and vendor support. The results include function, feature and service ratings for each model, grouped by vendor.

“Hospital leaders and technology purchasers need all the supporting data and market insight they can get to make informed buying decisions, with a keen focus on safety and quality,” said Jennifer L. Myers, ECRI Institute’s vice president of Select Health Technology Services, in a statement. “We rely on our partner health care organizations’ end-user experiences as one of the many tools hospitals can use to help make cost-effective purchasing decisions.”

Key findings of the survey show that MRI models with the highest overall user rating scored high in ease-of-use and image-quality criteria. MRI models with the lowest overall user rating scored lowest in reliability and vendor service.

MRI systems are grouped into three general categories based on magnetic field strength: 3T scanners, 1.5T scanners and low-field (1.2T or less) scanners. On a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the best, the average user rating for image quality across all 3T systems was 4.3 compared to 4.2 for all 1.5T systems.

When comparing the four MRI market leaders and their 1.5T MRI systems, the survey found the GE Optima MR450w had the highest average list price at approximately $3.5 million, and the Toshiba Vantage Titan 1.5T was the lowest at about $2.1 million. The system with the highest average quoted price was the Philips Ingenia 1.5T at $1.7 million compared to the Toshiba Vantage Titan 1.5T, which again came at the lowest price at $1.3 million. The highest average annual service price was for the Philips Ingenia 1.5T at $153,015 and the lowest price was for the Simens Magnetom Aera at $115,201.

The full report is available to ECRI Institute members on its website.

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The crown jewel of the project was an emergency critical power system that will support the entire 664-bed, 27-building campus, which covers seven square blocks. The project consolidated separate backup generators, previously stored throughout the campus, into one connected system with most of the infrastructure contained in a new central energy plant. Jake Ring, chief marketing officer at GE energy management, explained the system would drastically improve the reboot time for returning power to the entire campus in the event of an outage.

“In Illinois, it’s mandated that medical facilities have to restore power in the instance of an outage within 10 seconds,” Ring explained.

The new system dropped the delay in restoring power to 8.3 seconds for the entire campus. Although that is a staggeringly fast response to a power outage, it wasn’t fast enough for some systems, like MRI machines and data centers that store electronic medical records (EMR). Ring explained that some sensitive equipment should never be without power, so his company installed uninterruptible power supply systems at these locations, utilizing backup batteries.

Ring explained this need for uninterruptible power supply systems was becoming more prevalent in health care as electronic medical records became more ubiquitous throughout the industry. He said a 10 millisecond power flicker could cause a server to go down, disabling a hospital’s EMR system, which could take hours to get up and running again, meaning the only option is for the power to never go off.

The MRI machines and other sensitive imaging equipment are protected by surge protectors that shield them from damage resulting from lighting strikes and other surges, along with an uninterruptible power supply battery system. This ensures the expensive and important medical equipment will never get too much or too little power, either of which could damage it severely.

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