© 2024 University of Missouri - KBIA
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

MU Women’s and Children’s Hospital Opens New Imaging Center

Ben Brady
/
KBIA

MU Women’s and Children’s Hospital opened its new Women’s Imaging Center today. The Imaging Center is now the second center in Columbia that will have both screening and diagnostic services for women.

MU Health Care staff celebrated the opening with a ribbon-cutting ceremony in the lobby of the MU Women’s and Children’s Hospital.

The center will provide services such as 2-D/3-D screening mammographies, diagnostic bone densitometry and ultra sound-guided biopsy. Previously, all of these services were located in different parts of the hospital but now they are in one location.

Megha Garg, an associate professor of radiology at the MU School of Medicine, said the consolidation of all those services into one location is one of the biggest benefits of the imaging center.

“The rooms are right next to each other,” Garg said. “All females are there. So, the comfort and the privacy is there and all the tests are then available at that place only.”

Keri Simon, executive director of Women’s and Children’s Hospital, said the hospital had talked about adding the imaging center for last couple of years but needed to identify the space and staff needed to run the center.

Multiple health services have been growing on MU’s campus such as the emergency department, pediatric care and the intensive care unit. Simon said this may have delayed the imaging center.

“We, actually, on this campus are growing in a number of our services,” Simon said. “So, quite frankly, we probably would have done this sooner. Except we have been very focused on building some additional space for some of our other service areas that are growing.”

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month and both Garg and Simon encourage women to remember the importance of getting an annual breast health screening.

The center will start seeing patients this Thursday.

Related Content