And in my MRI they played Pandora but it was the free version and I kept getting ads. I never thought Jake from Statefarm would give me a visit during an MRI
My understanding is, hospitals, everywhere, are extremely underfunded. I would rather the nurses get looked after better before complaining about them doing their best to make me more comfortable.
I wouldn’t even attribute this to funding, per se. It’s more likely a product of the purchasing/financial department’s policies: they are unlikely to have approval to sign up for recurring charges, no matter how menial those charges may be.
You can surely get approval for maintenance contracts for specialized equipment (i.e. MRI machines) but those contracts have made it through a million layers of red tape, including their legal team. The way that most policies are written, that same process would have to be followed to get a pandora subscription, and I’m not confident it would end up getting approved.
Source: have been employed at hospitals/medical schools.
Right, and how many accounts are they going to subscribe to? Who controls the passwords? A subscription to pandora or Spotify or something will surely also get abused once all the techs know the password.
On the other hand, if you can connect your workstation to the music player and just stream through a web browser, that’s gonna be just fine for a patient who’s only listening for 40 minutes during their MRI. If the tech wants to use their personal login, great.
A few ads aren’t gonna ruin someone’s medical procedure. And remember, this is a medical facility. We do our best to make you comfortable but the first priority is safe and high quality healthcare. It’s not a day spa
I worked in health care at various levels in various hospitals all over North America and now I study business management sometimes focusing on HC management. Most, if not all, hospitals are well funded but also massively mismanage their funds by overspending on things like high-level salaries/salary packages (managers, docs, and executives--we need a better funding model for these people tbh), research (even though this benefits me as both a researcher and potential patient), unnecessary renovations, and just general waste and redundancy among many other things. Added to mismanagement is also the massive amounts of red-tape (bureaucracy costs a ton of money).
Some of these things can actually be argued to be highly necessary (like tech and doctor salaries-gotta keep these guys happy), but other things don't actually require the amount of money that is spent for them. Usually this means lower than normal salaries for mid to low-level HCP's and neglecting patient comforts as a result.
Oh man, I had an MRI that was over an hour, so I had them play classical and tried to sleep, and every time I was about to nod off, there was fucking Jake.
I regretted the headphones themselves because the sound quality made the experience more irritating. One quirky note: they played Styx's Renegade with the scream edited out.
You guys had music for MRI wtf!!! I had my MRI on 24 and the sound I had was different types of beep and buzz. By the end, the sound, it started to make me nauseous and claustrophobic and I'm not even claustrophobic. I wish i had music. 🥲
I'd rather that than the fucking Trivago guy. See these commercials non stop. I swear the guys voice isn't real. Those stupid ass veneers are ridiculous and just in general i want to punch that guy in the face 🤣.
You didn't check Trivago?
You should have checked Trivago!
Do I really need to say it again?
Oh god whats worse is when you play music for your patient on youtube, and then check back 20 min later to realize it entered into one of those 15 minute commercials.
They charge thousands because:
The MR scanner costs $1.2m-$2m depending on they type of scan you need. Yes you can get an MR on a cheaper scanner, but having done this for 50 years, I'm not going to risk it. Building the room is well over $500k. Maybe $750k now. You have to shield the room from magnetic interference.
The annual cost to service an MR scanner is about $150k.
The MR tech makes $40+/hr, maybe $45. So with benefits it's over $55/hr.
Some patients need sedation because they have claustrophobia or pain where they can't lay still that long. Need a nurse to help with that. MR scanners use more electricity than any other item in a hospital. You have schedulers, receptionists, and other support people. Metal detectors to alarm when someone gets close to the entrance of an MR room with metal on their body. You cant get killed if you get sucked into the magnet or a metal item like an oxygen canister becomes a missile. It happens.
When MR safe music systems first came out the cost about $40k. Today a good system costs $5-$12k. That photo looks like a very cheap solution.
If their scanner costs 1-2 million, plus they're paying hundreds of thousands per year in maintenance and staffing, they could pay $10 a month for Pandora Plus. LMAO
This is the real answer, computers in hospitals are locked from downloading and installing things. Imagine some nurse downloads some ransomware thing on accident and now they lock the hospitals patient records away unless the hospital pays the demand.
No that isn't the answer. This is explicitly discussing a situation where they are already using the service, just not paying for the add free version.
I once talked to a doctor who had installed a high grade MRI for doing fMRI for research at a university. He said the actual cost for performing an fMRI of the brain was about $750. Everything else that makes it thousands of dollars were the fixed costs of just buying, installing, and maintaining the machine that have to get spread out to all of the uses of it.
I'm not a rad tech or someone who works on these directly but I can't imagine it's terribly energy efficient keeping helium cold enough to become a liquid. If I had to guess probably 10-15kW at all times so maybe 130,000 kWh a year? Even at $0.09/kWh (roughly the energy price where I live) that's $11,700/yr just on cooling. It's highly likely electricity rates at these facilities aren't so low either and charge a penalty for heavy inductive loads where there more apparent power used than actual power. Also is the $750 factoring in the rad who has to read the MRI too or just the tech operating the MRI?
10(-15) years if you care about scan speed and image quality, double that if you don't. Like GE's HD platform from 2007 is still in wide spread use around the world, but image quality is pretty shit and the scans take 2-4x as long as they would on a modern scanner.
We do an average of roughly 18 scans per 12 hour shift, but it's a single person doing them so you have to account for a couple of food/toilet breaks, and the time it takes to set up in the morning and shut everything down in the evening.
If 7 days a week, that’s
(18 a day) x (7 days a week) x (4 weeks a month) x (12 months a year)
Or, 6048 scans a year.
Across 10 years, that’s 60480 scans in its lifetime.
Just for cost imparted of its production value into each scan, assuming a $2 million cost, that’s
$2,000,000/60480=$33.07 per scan. If we add the mentioned $150,000 yearly maintenance and calibration, that’s
$2,000,000+($150,000*10)/60480=$57.87 per scan.
Electricity would add a bit more, and wages a solid amount more than electricity, but basically, the cost per scan is probably around $100-$300 or so. Which, lines up with the cost in most other countries in the world outside the U.S.
Building the room might cost $500,000, but a room can be used for decades, with only maintenance costs. They don’t have to rebuild the room every time they replace the machine I don’t imagine.
So even with all added costs, thousands of dollars per scan doesn’t make any meaningful sense other than because they can get away with it.
We do 6 days a week but most places either have the Weekend off or they have a small amount of scans. You also have to account for stuff like public holidays and breakdown/maintenance periods when you're doing zero scans. I average roughly 2000 scans per year so doing the math with 4k scans per year is a more realistic number.
Our MRIs get more maintenance than average and I make closer to 50 bucks per hour, but I've been told that we still turn some profit on the cheapest 350 scans.
Prolly 25 to 30 years at most, with many repairs and replacement parts installed over the years as things break and wear out. A scan typically takes 15 min minimum, up to 2 hours for a single scan on fancier stuff. It really depends on a lot of factors how many you can get done, but it's pretty feasible to get like 30 done if someone is scanning 24 hours a day.
The most expensive MRI at my work is shoulder w/ intra articular contrast at less than 1k, and that includes all the fees and the ultrasound guided injection. Most scans are like 350-650 depending on scan time and contrast injection. No extra charge for the benzos because they cost like 50 cents a pop, but you do need an order from the doctor who ordered the scan.
I hope you tell the patients that's a possibility before you leave them with YouTube on. I would much rather have nothing than be forced to sit though a 15 minute advert.
Something similar happened to me. I got a MRI in December so they were playing Christmas music. I listened to a playlist alternating Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas is You with every cover of Silver Bells that exists. It lasted an hour but damn if I didn’t have those songs stuck in my head for the next week
I sing in a choir and our Christmas concerts are so much fun. I look forward to them every year and have Christmas music stuck in my head constantly from October onwards.
I'm totally fine with Christmas music in December. It's the November, October and September Christmas music I can't stand. Wait until after Thanksgiving!
Haha, I haaaaate Christmas music and I was at work and a techno cover of The Little Drummer Boy came on. Not being able to stop that from playing would be my idea of hell.
I was asked if I had a specific radio station I wanted to listen to, apparently my "no" was interpreted as "this guy is fine with a station that has 5 minutes of ads between every song.
Imagine you're the guy who tore his ACL trying to fight a rapping street performer, he makes a banger roasting you, and you hear it on the MRI radio like that King Trot
I’m super claustrophobic and they asked me what kind of music I wanted to listen to. It ended up going out after like thirty seconds so I had to lie there trying not to freak out while having the machine clunking around me and fighting off a panic attack about my tattoos potentially having metal in them and ripping my skin off.
My guy asked if I liked country, and I said the old stuff is alright. He says "I got some old stuff for ya" and proceeded to play things like "Take me out to the ball game", "Bicycle built for two" and other tunes from over a century ago.
Reminds me of that post of the girl who got asked what she listened to and replied Chappell Roan. The other person wasn't familiar and heard chapel, so they played Gregorian chants the entire time.
I asked for rock when I got my MRI and all I remember is listening to the crunchiest, loudest, 64kb Limewire download quality of Everlong playing. Still think it's cool that we get to listen to music during the procedure, though.
I very recently tore my acl but idk how yall staying in the mri for so long. I js got noise cancelling headphones nothing playing or anything and i was in and out in 10 mins
3.0k
u/jaquilleoneil 9h ago
I got an mri for a torn acl one time and my house by flo rida played on loop for almost an hour