SIDNEY -- Sidney Regional Medical Center officially announced its new Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) unit is in service.

The ribbon cutting was held at 11 a.m. today at the hospital. The event was led by SRMC CEO Jason Petik and Adam Stevens, Director of Radiology at Sidney Regional Medical Center. 

"I want to thank Adam for his leadership, for being the heart of rural health care and helping providing extraordinary care for all of our patients," Petik said.

Stevens said the new MRI unit is not accessible by the public because it is always in use. He said the building a new MRI unit was not quick or easy.

"First of all, we had to identify where our weak spots were, and then also what do we want to do," Stevens said.

The research involved level of service and type of equipment to be used. There were also talks with physicians, the administration and visiting other facilities.They wanted to know why people were seeking services in Sidney, as well as why SRMC is losing services.

"So, once we were able to identify that, I had some contacts with people who, from different MRI companies, so you know everybody's got just like cars everybody's got their own scanner to sell you and all of them have their ups and their downs, but we talked to the radiologists and I talked to some of my former colleagues at Omaha and it became very, very apparent that Seamans offered the machine that we needed here at Sidney Regional Medical Center," Stevens said.

He describes SRMC's new MRI as "more than a jack-of-all-trades." He said the hospital staff is still learning what the new MRI is capable of doing. He said it is not an open scanner, but it is wider, and the tube it shorter. The new MRI scanner has been in use since April 16.