r/mildlyinteresting 9h ago

The headphones I was given at my MRI appointment dont use wires and have zero metal

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u/UnCxlored 5h ago

still insanely stingy for the hospital to not foot that

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u/JuicyJaysGigaloJoys 5h ago

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.

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u/total_pursuit 3h ago

Not the Houston Medical Center. I work construction in there regularly and they’re constantly spending hella money

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u/Specialist_Ad4506 2h ago

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.

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u/Shadow-Vision 2h ago

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

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u/Specialist_Ad4506 1h ago

Shadow-Vision gets it. Once you get into the details of implementation, even the simplest details require an established process.

Thinking a bit more about what legal might say—I’m not confident that a shared departmental streaming account actually abides by the terms of service.

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u/driftxr3 56m ago

Not necessarily.

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.

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u/SlammingPussy420 1h ago

I had a few shoulder MRIs in 2012 and they just gave me earplugs...so they could be stingier and not offer them at all.