It always confused me. A hospital has an MRI or some other machine, and you hear they try to use it as little as possible to cut costs, because it costs them this or that amount per usage. But why would that be if they own it?
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I think if a hospital owns an MRI, it would be in constant use. They do have to pay for technicians to run the machine and doctors to interpret the results.
That said, sometimes doctors don’t take patient concerns seriously. If you think you have symptoms that make an MRI necessary, try a different doctor. You have to be an advocate for yourself
Machines like MRI’s are extremely expensive to maintain. They have maintenance contracts that can cost $10,000 per month. All medical equipment’s parts are astronomically expensive. Some of the maintenance is based on hours of use, the more they use it the more it costs.
You own a car, the car costs money every mile you put on it. Multiply that by a million for an MRI.
Other people have mentioned operating costs of the hospital machinery and such, but one aspect specific to MRI machines that makes their upkeep *astronomically* high compared to other devices – it requires continous cooling using liquid helium.
The ELI5 version is that the very strong magnets in an MRI can’t function properly without the extreme cooling – cooling it below a certain temperature alters the magnets in a way that allow the field to be contained. Without the liquid helium supply, you’re just setting off a massive EMP inside a hospital.
So aside from the massive electricity usage, you need a steady supply of liquid helium, which isn’t cheap or easy to get hold of and keep stored.
For every X Hours of run time there is usually Y Hours of maintenance needed.
Power Consumption
Consumables
Properly trained people operating it.
How do you know the hospital owns the MRI machine? They very likely lease it, meaning they pay for its use. The lease may be tied to the use, not the time. In other words, rather than paying a monthly lease fee, they may be paying by the number of uses or the time it’s on.
For comparison, one can get an MRI done in South East Asia for $150 and that includes a Radiologist interpretation. The machines used are from GE, Siemens etc, similar to the machines found in the US but likely not the latest model.
Granted the cost of labor, insurance, liability etc are multiples more in the US than SE Asia. I still wonder if if that justifies the cost of doing MRI here.
There’s the cost it took to buy the machine, the cost of the knowledge of the person running the machine, the power and resources it took to run the machine (like liquid helium for an MRI, which we only have a finite supply of, or the isotopes for other scans, like a PET scan). And then it also costs money to clean the room and machine after the patient has used it. There’s the cost of the knowledge the doctors have to interpret the results of that scan. And there’s the cost of maintenance to maintain and repair the machine when it breaks.
It’s much more than just the machine.
In the modern world, in western society, the cost of the machine is usually a pittance next to the cost of the person to operate it. A very simple example – a car used as a Uber. The car will last say four years – $60k, that’s $15k per year. Add a few thousand for insurance and then gas on top of that – maybe we are talking about as much as $30k a year.
The driver makes $60k at least. The driver is twice the cost of the car. That is true of just about any machine you can name. People are expensive. Machines are cheap.
Do you have a car? Can I use it whenever you aren’t using it
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