And speaking of subscriptions, congratulations to Garnold Bodenheimer of Georgia for winning the March drawing fom our "Forward To A Friend" campaign. Garnold, who shared the March issue with 12 colleagues, will receive the subscribers edition of all of the remaining issues of the 2007 MRI Newsletter. As this April issue is a full-access edition, there has never been a better time than now to forward this copy of the newsletter to colleagues you think would benefit from information on MRI suite planning, safety and efficiency. Go to the 'Share The News' section below for all the details.

We hope to have a chance to visit with you at one of our upcoming presentations. The first venue this year... the AHRA spring conference in Phoenix at the end of this month! Look under 'News Bite' below for links to both AHRA conferences (we're presenting at the annual meeting, too) and information on other confirmed presentations.

As always, please contact us if you have questions about anything you read in the newsletter, or if we can be of any assistance to you.

Tobias Gilk
Junk Architects, PC

Share The News,
Win A Subscription!

As a special offer, we are now awarding one free full-access subscription each month. When you use the 'Forward This To A Colleague' button at the foot of each emailed newsletter, we will pick one person at random to receive a free full-access subscription for the remainder of the year.

Forward the MRI Newsletter to your colleagues (use the link at the foot of this email) and you will have a chance to win a free year's subscription. Forward it to 5 or 10 MRI colleagues and you help to assure that we'll draw your name! But you must use the link at the bottom of this email if you want to be entered into this month's drawing!

MRI-Planning Announces Confirmed Presentations!

Act now to sign up to attend AHRA's Spring Conference , April 25-27, in Phoenix, AZ. We will be presenting on MRI safety, including an introduction to the 2007 edition of the ACR Guidance Document for Safe MR Practices.

Also, we will also be presenting at AHRA's Annual Meeting, July 8-12. There, in Orlando, we will be presenting design principles for whole radiology departments, allowing providers to work with their designers to develop more effective and efficient facilities for all modalities.

We also have confirmed presentations scheduled for the American Society of Healthcare Risk Management's annual meeting, and the SMRT Syracuse Regional meeting, both for this fall. Several others are as yet unconfirmed.

MRI Newsletter - Article Archive Is Available On Line!

Don't forget that we now have the archive of previous MRI Newsletter articles available. Click here to see all the articles that are available.

While the archive index is available to everyone, only subscribers will be able to access the full text of the articles, except the published public access issues.

Special Public Access Article:

Joint Commission MRI Surveys
What It's Been & What It's Likely To Be
By Robert Junk, AIA, AHRA and Tobias Gilk

We recently received a call from a university that was terribly proud of their brand new MRI and wanted to coax us into writing a feature about their installation. Unfortunately, the ten-thousand-and-something^th MRI, in and of itself, isn’t a very captivating story. MRI equipment has become widespread enough that it is now an expected part of conventional clinical care. So how is it that equipment that is almost ubiquitous in US healthcare and yet still trumpeted by public relations officials and, most recently, the American Cancer Society (which called for an additional 1.4 million annual MRIs for breast cancer screening) can be almost completely invisible during Joint Commission surveys?

Click here to be taken to the full article.

Special Public Access Article:

Effective MRI Suites
Total Process Management.
By Tobias Gilk

Life is full of trade-offs. We build ourselves into situations where things we want become mutually exclusive. This phenomenon occurs in our professional world as much as it does in the rest of our life. Today, financial pressures are compelling diagnostic imaging facilities to maximize referrals and squeeze more patients into a given month, and at the same time the ACR comes out with new guidance on MRI safety that probably demand unanticipated changes if a facility is to comply. Which do you choose, (a) throughput or (b) safety? What if your options included a third option, (c) both?

Click here to be taken to the full article.

Special Public Access Article:

The MRI Equipment Vendor Diet
By Tobias Gilk

You may not have noticed it, but our website has lost a little weight. Earlier this year we sent a notice to the vendors of after-market MRI equipment and supplies which had been listed on MRI-Planning.com under the ‘Vendor Links’ page. In that notice we asked each vendor to tell us that they currently complied (or were working to comply by the end of the year) with the new ASTM / FDA testing and labeling criteria. Of the several multi-product vendors that were listed on the site at the beginning of 2007, only two have responded so far and remain listed today.

Click here to be taken to the full article.

Articles In The Works

• Lighting In The MRI Suite
• Siting Impacts On Image Quality
• Magnet Upgrade Path

We Love Hearing From You!

MRI-Planning

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Kansas City, MO 54105

816-472-7722

MRI_Expert@MRI-Planning.com