Many people who deal with claustrophobia have trouble climbing into an MRI scanner, but the staff at Dignity Health Mercy Hospital in Folsom, California, are helping to relieve some of that stress.

"Mercy Hospital of Folsom has been growing for quite some time and we're always looking to augment our services and add additional services and open MRI just made a lot of sense," said Edmundo Castaneda, president of Mercy Hospital of Folsom and Mercy General Hospital. "It's something that will complement our existing service offerings and we're certainly excited about the technology itself. It's open MRI, 1.2 Tesla, so the strength and image quality are excellent."

The new investment, worth $1.5 million, will not only improve image quality and diagnostic evaluation, it will also provide the hospital with a better system when serving their patients. 

“Before we got the MRI we would accomodate patients that were in house patients with one of our sister facilities that's nearby. They would be taken to the other facility, the MRI would be taken and then we would get the patient back and obviously the results," Castaneda said. "Their coorespondent care would follow suit in accordance with whatever diagnostic information we were given through MRI, so regarding our inpatient population it's obviously going to be better to be able to keep our patients here in house to diagnose them. Regarding outpatients it's obviously an additional modality that we didn't have in the past so I do think that we are going to see some additional patients by virtue of the fact that we got the MRI now and we didn't before."

Mercy Hospital of Folsom received the new device Oct. 24 and have already seen about 50 patients in the past couple of weeks.

Castaneda says that this investment is a step forward in fulfilling the mission of the hospital.

“Our mission is first and foremost about patient care and serving our community and this is all about remaining focused on our mission and being able to provide the community here in Folsom. We are fortunate both as a hospital and as a community in that Folsom has been growing and we are poised to grow as a hospital with the community. Actually, I have plans for expansion of our facility over the course of 5 to 7 years, this is one component of growth at Mercy Folsom now and there will be a lot more growth in the future," said Castaneda.