EVERETT — Chris Sloan peers at the screen in front of him, going over minute details of the insides of the test patient in the adjoining room.
“Small bowel here. You’ve got your large bowel out here. There’s the stomach. There’s the pancreas. Here’s the gall bladder, there’s no stones or sludge,” said Sloan, a technologist with Western Washington Medical Group. “Abdomen work has come such a long way on the MRI.”
The MRI machine is one of the featured pieces of equipment at Western Washington Medical Group’s new Imaging Center at 3822 Colby Ave. in Everett. The center, which opened in September, also includes a CT scan machine, ultrasound equipment and an X-ray machine.
All of the equipment is high end, state of the art, said Dr. David Russian, Western Washington Medical Group’s CEO.
“You might ask why they’re such expensive studies, but if they prevent an exploratory surgery or they tell you everything is fine then it’s all a good thing for you,” Russian said.
The Imaging Center is the next step for the growing Western Washington Medical Group.
The group used to contract with outside groups for these scans, but made the decision to open its own imaging center.
The medical group expects about 3,000 to 6,000 patients to be seen at the center each year.
The equipment and remodeling of the 3,000-square-foot office space cost about $3 million, Russian said.
The group was fortunate to move into the building, which was the former Everett Radia Imaging Center, Russian said. The layout of the building was already suited for much of the equipment. Even a copper shielding in one of the rooms needed only minor repairs.
Western Washington Medical Group has grown from about 45 to 50 medical providers to more than 90 in just the past few years.
Demands from electronic medical record keeping to payment systems are spurring further growth and consolidation in the medical community, Russian said.
The requirements are both from the government and outside groups.
“They’re demanding a certain format for how you do your job,” Russian said. “Whether that adds value, that’s a deep discussion that I wouldn’t pretend to be smart enough to know the answer to. Them’s the rules. You’ve got to play by that game.”
Western Washington Medical Group expects to continue to grow.
“We’re still in a part of the country where we make stuff that people want. So we want to grow to meet the increase of population,” Russian said.
For now, the medical group is adjusting to owning its own imaging center. In early September, the center went through several test patients on the MRI machine, getting a handle of the new equipment. Russian was one of the test patients, listening to the Rolling Stones during the noisy half-hour of the testing.
The imaging center includes an X-ray machine even though it already has X-ray machines at other clinics.
“X-rays are like the white bread of radiology,” Russian said. “There are certain roles for them. They’re easy and they’re inexpensive and they’re good for bones and fractures. It’s just a standard thing to have at an imaging center. You’ve got to have it.”
With the Imaging Center in house, it will make it easier for Western Washington Medical Group providers to have access to the information.
“Your patient can go wherever they want,” Russian said. “If an 88-year-old lady up in Arlington wants to go to the hospital in Arlington for her CT, of course, that’s something we can do for her.
“It’s better for the group and, probably ultimately better for the patient, if everything is in one site for the physician and all of the physicians seeing her within the group to have the best access (to her medical scans).
“Hopefully the majority of our patients will come down here.”
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