Hunt Completes Electrical Work for New Intraoperative MRI (iMRI) Suite at Children's Minnesota

New Surgery Suite for Children's Minnesota

January 2023 – Bloomington, MN – A very challenging and highly technical project?  Sign us up.

In just over a month, Children’s Minnesota will perform the first surgery in it’s new intraoperative MRI (iMRI) suite – a three-room, 2,970 square foot facility.  This is a first of it’s kind in North America.

For us, 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. 

But a couple other key facts that might blow your mind:

• 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 backup.  No surgeries can happen when 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 minutes to “make everything safe”, close up panels, and turn the switch back on.

Projects like this require our 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.  They all have long standing relationships with Children’s and are expert team players with impressive lists of projects they’ve completed at Children’s.  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 safe.

Learn more and see a video about this cool project here:  https://www.kare11.com/article/news/health/childrens-minnesota-unveils-new-imri-suite/89-57f41658-6dd3-42c2-8250-9e0149e4af79