TAHLEQUAH – With a continued eye on health care, Cherokee Nation held a ribbon-cutting ceremony unveiling a mobile MRI unit on Aug. 5 at the tribe’s W.W. Hastings Hospital in Tahlequah.

The $2 million investment will provide a place for patients to receive an MRI at the hospital, where previously they had to access these services off-site.

“We are witnessing progress of the health care in the Cherokee Nation and that is something that has become the norm not over the last year, not over the last three years, but over the past decades,” Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. said.

By bringing this to Tahlequah, Cherokee Nation Health Services Executive Director Dr. R. Stephen Jones said “patient care and satisfaction” would be increased. 

“This unit will decrease the length of time from order placement to exam completion, providing results more efficiently, and will increase capacity of daily in-patient and emergent MRI scans performed,” Jones said.

While the unit will operate faster and quieter, General Electric Territory Manager Mark Soto said it is also larger to help patients feel more comfortable.

“Normally, these are put in much smaller buildings; they call them mobile units. But this is what we call transportable; it’s about 12-foot longer than a normal mobile and about 4-foot wider,” he said. “The reason that this is larger is because of patient comfort. Anyone coming for an MRI is usually sick, so anything that we can do to make them feel more comfortable, that’s our goal.”

As for the unit itself, General Electric Health Care Service Engineer Dave Eckerson said it is the first of its kind in Oklahoma.

“This is a state-of-the-art MRI that was never in a mobile environment or a relocatable environment. I believe this is only the second one in the United States. This is leading the future of relocatable equipment,” Eckerson said. “Cherokee Nation is dedicated to health care for its citizens. They are sparing no expense to have state-of-the-art imagining equipment. I work in hospitals all across southeast Oklahoma and they (Cherokee Nation) are leading the way in health care.”

According to a CN press release, the unit will enhance Hastings’ Acute Stroke Ready Certification program and stroke care that is provided thanks to a partnership with Regional Brain Institute. This allows W.W. Hastings to be the only hospital in the region to have a nationally certified stroke program, the release states.