Have you ever needed an MRI and struggled to find one that would fit you? Did that difficulty prevent you from seeking care, preventative or time-sensitive? You're not alone.
High-capacity imaging equipment, such as an MRI or CT Scanner, is surprisingly hard to find, even though there are more wide-bore and open MRIs available than ever before. Their locations are often a mystery to patients and medical providers. Finding accommodating facilities to fulfill a doctor's request often requires an exhaustive, frustrating, and sometimes fruitless search.
This lack of information frequently leads to patients arriving at medical facilities that can't accommodate their bodies, delays in testing, and the associated risks of not receiving timely or accurate diagnoses in urgent situations. This lack of visibility into equipment locations is also a serious obstacle to patients seeking preventative care, and as a result, too often they don't.
At Friendly Like Me, one of our core goals is making accessibility information easier to find.
“In an emergency, I want my doctor, my ambulance driver, and my family to know which healthcare facilities are equipped for my body,” says Friendly Like Me founder, Elysia Everett.
Searches for facilities that can accommodate non-average bodies should be easier. And when one person finds an accommodating location, we want that to be the last time the search was difficult for any of us. This requires that we rally together as a community and commit to creating a size-accessible world by showing clearly what we need and how many of us need it.
When you find an accessible provider, pay it forward for the next person by reviewing the place for the presence or absence of accessibility accommodations on the Friendly Like Me app. The more of these locations we catalog, the sooner we'll be routinely helping patients find the equipment they need.
See an example of what a Friendly Review for MRI equipment looks like. Keep them coming, community!
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