PORT ANGELES — Olympic Medical Center’s new CT scanner will produce more images with less radiation in surroundings more comfortable for patients.
Hospital district commissioners approved its purchase in a special meeting Tuesday to take advantage of a year-end bargain offered by the Munich, Germany-based electronics firm Siemens.
Siemens won the contract over rival bidders Toshiba and General Electric following financial and clinical studies that included visiting a site where a similar scanner is in use.
“We drove the price down $100,000 the past week,” said Eric Lewis, hospital CEO, about the $595,000 price of the 64-slice scanner.
The final price is still enough to buy almost 27 Toyota Camrys at their manufacturer’s suggested retail price of nearly $23,000.
In addition, the hospital will buy a service contract for $84,746, the equivalent of 3.7 more Camrys.
The hospital had budgeted $699,000 for the machine.
The price included future software improvements that otherwise could cost $50,000 more in what Dr. Scott Kennedy, OMC chief medical and operating officer, called “the upgrade creeping expense.”
The machine is expected to stay in service for 10 years.
OMC will house it in a rebuilt file room that will provide more maneuvering room for hospital gurneys.
The remodeling will cost another $950,000.
The new scanner will be cooled with water, which will make the process quieter for patients. The scanner’s portal also will accommodate larger patients.
It is expected to go online this spring.
CT scans, sometimes called CAT scans, are special X-rays that produce cross-sectional images — known as slices — of the body using radiology and a computer.
The new machine will eclipse a 16-slice CT scanner that’s 12 years old and that will be used as backup, “to build in redundancy for when two CT scanners are needed at the same time, which can happen with a Level 3 trauma center like ours,” Kennedy said.
CT scans at OMC have climbed from 897 in October 2012 to 975 in October 2013 to 1,145 a couple of months ago, he said.
OMC has another 64-slice scanner at its cancer center in Sequim.
An add-on to the new machine could make it a real heart-stopper, Kennedy said.
Coupled to an electrocardiogram, it could produce image after image of a patient’s heart at the same point in its beating, like picturing a moving pendulum at the same point in its swing.
________
Reporter James Casey can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5074, or at jcasey@peninsuladailynews.com
