Children's Minnesota will soon unveil a new intraoperative MRI (iMRI) suite — a three-room, 2,970-square-foot facility. This is a first-of-its-kind facility in North America.
To install the breaker to feed this new space required shutting down 8 floors of critical power for a 2-hour window of time. No surgeries can happen when critical power is off.
New intraoperative MRI (iMRI) suite
In just over a month, Children’s Minnesota will perform the first surgery in its new iMRI suite
In just over a month, Children’s Minnesota will perform the first surgery in its new intraoperative MRI (iMRI) suite – a three-room, 2,970 square foot facility. For Hunt Electric, the project consisted of the merger of an MRI diagnostic room and an operating room combined.
The MRI travels on a track system overhead between two special rooms. The shielding requirements, special wiring practices, and controls were all part of this complex installation. That’s the technical jargon.
A few other key facts about Children's Minnesota's new iMRI suite include:
- To install the breaker to feed this new space required shutting down 8 floors of critical power for a 2 hour window of time. Critical power is all on generator back-up. No surgeries can happen when the critical power is off.
- So, to pull this off successfully – It takes 3 months to coordinate that 2-hour shutdown. During the shutdown, all patients on those 8 floors have to be plugged into white outlets (normal power).
- The lab in the basement is open 24 hours, so that required a lot of temporary power to keep their equipment running.
- Everything was coordinated and scheduled for this shutdown and an emergency surgery came in so they had to start over and reschedule. What does ‘start over’ mean? All of the temporary power had to be changed back over to normal power and that requires specific timing and certain processes.
- During all of this, when the electrical team is ready to go, if a trauma/emergency case comes in and needs an operating room – we have 1 minute to ‘make everything safe’, close up panels, and turn the switch back on.
Hunt Electric’s expert team
Projects like this require the Hunt Electric staff’s willingness to go above and beyond
Projects like this require the Hunt Electric staff’s willingness to go above and beyond, and be really creative – which for this team, isn’t even a second thought.
General Foreman - Sara Johnson coordinated the shutdowns and General Foreman - Nick Langer was the General Foreman for the construction project. Pair them up with Brandon Heinzen as the Project Manager and everyone is winning.
Long standing relationships with Children’s Minnesota
They all have long standing relationships with Children’s Minnesota and are expert team players with impressive lists of projects that they’ve completed at the hospital.
This has resulted in them having intimate knowledge of the campus and a strong sense of pride to be a part of keeping the kids at Children's Minnesota safe.
