Caro hospital adds state-of-the-art machines
By Bill Petzold
Editor
Photos by Bill Petzold
Caro Community Hospital, 401 N. Hooper St. in Caro, gave residents a glimpse of their two newest medical machines during an open house Wednesday evening. Above, Holly Henry, RT (R) demonstrates how a patient would be scanned using the hospital’s new 64-slice CT scanner. The green light on the wall is emitted by the machine, which helps provide a soothing enviroment for patients. Below, Assistant Radiology Manager Robin Topham, seated at the computer in the hospital’s new bone density suite, shows how the hospital uses its new bone density scanner to detect osteoporosis and predict the risk a person has of suffering a fracture.
CARO — A couple of recent investments have put Caro Community Hospital a big step closer to the cutting edge of medical technology.
The hospital hosted an open house Wednesday so the public could get a look at the hospital’s new bone density scanner and state-of-the-art 64-slice CT scanner.
The bone density scanner, built by Hologic, Inc. provides both visual and statistical information about a patient that can be used to diagnosis bone diseases like Osteoporosis, as well as providing patients with an amazing high-tech way to see the effects of exercise on the makeup of the body.
The bone density scanner is located in a new suite that the hospital built specifically for it that features wider doors to allow for patients in wheelchairs to use the machine.
“This gives us a lot more manueverablity and availability for our machine,” said CCH Patient Care Coordinator Theresa Atkinson, “We previously offered this service, but now we have a few more capabilities with this machine, a lot newer software. This is able to do a whole-body scan, which measures the amount of fat and muscle in your entire body.”
“It’s not a BMI, it’s body composition,” said Joyce Paucek, an Osteoporosis Specialist for Hologic. “BMI is just a number, your weight divided by your height squared. This is not. This literally tells you how many grams of fat you have here, here and here from head to toe.”
“From personal experience, it’s not pretty,” Atkinson said, laughing.
“The purpose of this, and we mentioned osteoporosis, but you want to be proactive and you want to prevent fracture,” Paucek said. “That’s the whole idea, to prevent fractures. It’s predominantly women, but men get osteoporosis too; it’s like 1 in 2 women, and one in four, maybe one in five men, depending on what you read.”
Paucek provided a couple of examples of the type of data the machines provides, which can be used to calculate a persons risk of developing osteoporosis or fracturing a bone. Another sheet of data showed how the machine could be used to track a person’s progress while training for an athletic event such as a race. The service is not expensive, and could be a valuable tool for athletes who want to accurately track their results down to the gram and percentage.
The 64-slice CT scanner (CT stands for Computed Tomography) is a major upgrade for CCH, a state of the art machine that puts the Caro hospital’s ability to scan the human body up there with any hospital.
“This particular machine, it’s a 64-slice scanner, so compared to the machine that came out, it’s giving us significantly more anatomical coverage per rotation, so the studies are done significantly faster,” said Dave Jolly, regional sales manager for Delta Medical Systems, explaining how the machine is vastly more capable than the hospital’s previous 4-slice machine. “Secondly, what’s very important in the CT world today is the radiation dose that the patient is actually exposed to. This has got technology … where patients are exposed to significantly less dose then what they used to with other type of systems.”
Hospital officials were excited to be able to offer the same quality of care as big-city hospitals right in the community.
“They’re investments that the hospital has made,” Atkinson said. “It helps the community out just for the fact that there is very little that we cannot do here. Definitely check with us before having to drive to Saginaw or anywhere else because there are so many things we can do in the community now that make it easier, more accessible, closer … and usually we get people in a really quick manner.”
For more information about Caro Community Hospital, visit www.cch-mi.org or call (989) 673-3141.
Bill Petzold is the editor of the Tuscola County Advertiser. He can be reached at petzold@tcadvertiser.com.