Modular addition of CTs and MRIs cuts time to launch, reduces costs

Kemptville District Hospital (KDH), a 40-bed, acute-care facility 50 kilometres south of Ottawa, has joined a growing list of hospitals opting for a prefabricated modular addition to house a new CT or MRI scanner.

Supplied by SDI Canada and constructed offsite in Hamilton, the prefabricated modular cassettes can usually be delivered faster and at less cost than renovating or building an addition to a hospital onsite.

“For a bricks-and-mortar build from the ground up, it was probably going to take us 18 to 24 months to get everything in place,” said Brittany Rivard, KDH’s chief financial officer and vice-president of operations. “With the prefab modular cassette, we were anticipating 12 to 18 months. That’s significantly faster than it would have been if we were to construct an entire addition off our building.”

In the aftermath of the pandemic, Rivard was also concerned about escalating costs, and concluded that a larger percentage of the overall costs would be predictable using prefab modular construction.

SDI has also delivered prefab modular cassettes to Richmond Hospital in British Columbia, the Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg, Brockville General Hospital in Ontario and a private MRI research centre in Laval, Quebec.

Another prefab addition for Headwaters Health Care Centre in Orangeville, Ontario is in progress and at least a half-dozen other projects are in the pipeline, noted SDI president Toufic Abiad.

“We delivered a two-cassette addition to Brockville in 12 months,” he said. “Initially, it was supposed to be traditional construction that would have taken two and a half years. That equates with thousands of extra scans. It’s the same with Kemptville. If we do this 20 times in Ontario, we can fast forward scanning by 20 years.”

In addition to faster construction and cost savings, both Rivard and Abiad claim prefab construction in a controlled environment results in superior quality.

SDI Canada had its start in 2003 as a shielding vendor importing MRI shields from the U.S. and evolved over the years to offer turnkey construction for diagnostic imaging departments. In 2013, Abiad bought out the U.S. based shielding manufacturer and six years later transferred the manufacturing to Canada.

He subsequently struck a relationship with PDC Facilities, a prefabricated modular cassette manufacturer in Wisconsin to supply the Canadian market and ultimately signed a licencing agreement to manufacture in Canada. The KDH project was SDI’s first Canadian manufactured prefab job.

“We took the American solution and invested a half million dollars to re-engineer it to make it Canadian compliant,” said Abiad.

Going forward, SDI plans to manufacture prefab modular cassettes for CTs in Canada and continue importing MRI units from the U.S.

Tariffs, given the current trade war with the Trump administration “aren’t an issue,” said Abiad, “because it’s our understanding that healthcare will be spared. The worst thing the Canadian government could do is sanction healthcare.”

SDI also has a relationship with a supplier of patient experience solutions that help to put patients at ease during a scan.

A colourful nature scene directly above KDH’s CT scanner, for example, reduces anxiety and helps to improve imaging quality. Patient-experience additions to the scanning suite are especially important for children, who might otherwise require anesthetic to keep them from moving on the table while in the gantry, said Abiad.

The two cassettes for Kemptville, each weighing 80,000 pounds, were delivered from Hamilton, a distance of 500 kilometres, on two 130-foot super-trailers and hoisted onto a preconstructed slab using a 550-ton crane. The GE CT scanner was introduced onsite by sliding it into place through an opening in the cassette and installed by the GE staff.

“The tolerances were in millimetres,” said Rivard. “We were blown away by how perfectly everything aligned.” The integration with the existing diagnostic imaging department was made possible by relocating a small staff lounge and creating an opening for a hallway joining the original building with the prefabricated modular addition.

KDH had sufficient space outside the hospital building to accommodate the cassettes and only lost a handful of parking spaces. That was important because insufficient space outside the building would have eliminated the option of a prefab addition.

For Soldiers’ Memorial Hospital in Orillia, for example, SDI recommended the renovation of a space inside their building because there was no space outside the hospital to accommodate a prefab addition.

“Orillia had a wonderful space inside the building, so we were able to do traditional construction there,” said Abiad. “The first thing we do is a case study because modular doesn’t apply everywhere. Where it makes sense, we still do traditional construction. It’s important to study the business case and look at all of the options.”

The acquisition of a CT scanner at KDH is an important milestone for the community as patients in the hospital’s catchment area between Ottawa and Brockville, and stretching from Smiths Falls to Winchester, will no longer have to travel out of the community for CT scans. Additionally, wait times will more than likely be lower, said Rivard.

The KDH project was made possible by a $2.3 million donation from the hospital foundation and contributions of $900,000 from both the municipality and the county for another $1.8 million to be delivered in installments over a 10-year period. The total cost of the project was $4.6 million.

“The foundation and the community did an unbelievable job raising money and blew us away with how generous everyone was,” said Rivard.

Operating costs will be more of a challenge as Ontario Health requires hospitals to find room in their existing operating budgets, and that’s getting harder and harder to do, said Rivard.

“When the project was first approved, operating costs were estimated to be $400,000 per year and we thought we’d be able to cover that, but with the pandemic and the human resource crisis in healthcare, the costs have ballooned.”

She continued, “Actual operating costs are now considerably higher. We’re anticipating close to $700,000, but we are working with Ontario Health and the Ministry to ensure that everything within our hospital continues to be funded.”