Across from the front door lobby at Mineral Community Hospital, there’s a room with an ominous yellow warning sign with red letters which reads, “Caution: Do Not Open, Radiation Area”. What’s behind that closed door is a large donut shaped machine with a gurney-style bed called a “scanning couch”.

Despite the warning sign, this machine saves lives. It’s a CT scanner which stands for “computer tomography” and takes several X-Ray images of a person from different angles to allow doctors to see what’s inside without any cutting. It’s a vital piece of equipment for the hospital.

“Along the freeway (Interstate 90), the closest CT scanners, other than ours, are Missoula and Kellogg, Idaho,” said hospital CEO, Ron Gleason. “We are a level four trauma center and so our goal is that if we have a severe trauma, this is the place to come for stabilization to make sure people make it to the next location. We are a trauma receiving facility and do the evaluations to determine the next level of care or what we can take care of internally.”

Seconds matter when it comes to life and death emergencies at the hospital. The accident patient is placed in the scanner and can be evaluated for internal bleeding, head and neck injury, damage to internal organs, or broken bones.

“If we have a head and neck patient, after a CT scan is done and the patient is shipped to another facility like St. Pat’s (in Missoula), we can send all the information about the patient to them through PACS, and so they don’t need to do another CT scan,” said Chris West, the Imaging Department Manager.

PACS is “Picture Archiving Communication Systems”, and is used for any type of transmission from mammography, MRI’s, to CT’s. It also communicates with the hospital’s telestroke equipment and a patient’s results can be sent directly to a neurologists for immediate evaluation.

Last week, The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust’s Rural Healthcare Program announced that they were awarding the hospital $400,000 for a new 32-slice CT scanner. It will replace the current scanner with the ability to do faster scans, and create better images. It also provides up to 75 percent less radiation than the current model.

“They’ve been fantastic to us,” said Gleason, “four years ago they also bought our mammography equipment, plus paid for renovating the space for it.”

The Helmsley Trust had granted the hospital $460,000 for that project. For the scanner, Gleason wrote the grant and said the Helmsley people were great to work with and made the process an easy one. He also had the help of several staff members, who lent their medical expertise to the granting process.

The Helmsley Charitable Trust awards organizations and initiatives in the upper Midwest states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Minnesota, Iowa and Montana. The Helmsley’s were real estate moguls in the 1970’s and 80’s and owned a hotel chain and several properties, including the Empire State Building.

Their charitable trust supports health, education and human services and the Helmsley’s Rural Healthcare Program specifically funds projects that help aid rural areas, “by bringing the latest medical therapies to patients in remote areas,” according to their press release. Harry had passed away in 1997 and Leona, in 2007.

“They are reaching out to small rural communities and making a big difference,” said West.

Mineral Community Hospital is one of 41 grant recipients across the region to benefit from this round of funding to purchase CT scanners. Helmsley’s Rural Healthcare Program has granted over $30 million to support the purchase of scanners in a seven-state region.

“Our goal is to ensure that people who live in rural America have access to quality healthcare as close to home as possible,” said Walter Panzirer, a trustee of the Helmsley Charitable Trust. “To achieve this, rural hospitals need to be viable and they need to have up-to-date equipment, so patients can receive essential healthcare locally. This initiative is one of many that aims to improve healthcare access and health outcomes across the upper Midwest.”

The CT scanner being replaced is the same brand as the new one, a Toshiba. It will be “apples to apples” for training said West. The old one was manufactured in 2004 and refurbished in 2008. The hospital got it in 2009 and will either trade or sell it.

In addition to less radiation, this scanner will provide better images. For example, if a patient has a prosthetic, such as a hip replacement, the old equipment would bounce off the metal and create, what West calls, a “star effect”. It would cause distortion on the image. The new software does not distort the image.

Gleason said the reduction in radiation is going to make a difference in people’s lives, especially when it comes to children, “there’s not a lot of literature out there that says CT radiation does bad things. But the discussion is out there and we really need to get the radiation down.”

Another great thing about the new scanner is the maintenance contract. The hospital is currently paying around $183,000 for a three-year maintenance contract. The new scanner will come with a warranty and much lower maintenance costs. A few years ago, the current scanner blew a tube, which would have cost $250,000 without the maintenance contract.

“It’s an expensive piece of equipment,” said Gleason, “and we’re so grateful to receive this grant.”

The funding initiative for the grant was the result of a survey of Critical Access Hospitals in the Rural Healthcare Program’s seven-state region. Capital equipment, particularly CT scanners, was identified as a top need by many hospitals. In addition, a new Medicare policy went into effect January 1, 2016, that reduced reimbursement for certain studies on CT scanners that do not meet specific radiation dose requirements. Since 2015, the Helmsley Charitable Trust has awarded 78 grants totaling over $30 million to outfit hospitals with new, state-of-the-art CT scanners.