2023-12-20 Winter Update from the MRRC
Hi All,
I am reaching out with a winter update from the MRRC leadership team.
1. Retirement announcement of Tom Potter
Tom Potter, our lead MRI technologist, is retiring effective the last day of this year. Congratulations to Tom on his long career as an MR technologist and for his valuable contributions to the MRRC as lead technologist. If you would like to extend words of congratulations and/or appreciation, Tom’s email address is potterte@upmc.edu. Please understand the MRRC will be understaffed as we internally promote a technologist to the lead role and recruit a replacement technologist. You may notice certain times are blocked on the schedule due to staffing issues. If you are unsure about the availability of a certain time, feel free to submit a priority request using the scheduling software to see if we can open it for you. Additionally, as a temporary measure to minimize impact on the weekday schedule, we blocked off Saturdays after 12:30pm.
2. Reminder about proper fixed slot usage and suggested pro-community calendar behavior
Fixed slots are a mechanism to provide high throughput study teams a dedicated weekly slot to offer to participants. As a reminder, these reservations are provided on the promise that at least 50% of them will be used. If usage of the reserved time drops below 50% in a 3-month period, the MRRC reserves the right to take the reserved time away. We must do this because unused fixed slots can result in lost revenue, which has a direct impact on the hourly scan rate.
If you know you will not be using one of your fixed slots due to the upcoming holiday break, a staffing issue, or slow recruiting, please click your slot on our calendar, select “Edit Entry”, and change the slot type to “Fixed Slot Available” to indicate the slot is not needed by your study team. This makes the slot light blue on the calendar and allows other groups to use that time. Although the MRRC will automatically open your unused fixed slots approximately 5 days out from the time of the session, this is a study team responsibility that is often neglected. Not opening your slot as soon as you know you will not need it makes scheduling much harder for over 1/3rd of our users that must use on demand scheduling (rather than fixed slots) due to unique recruitment demands. Please think about how your actions/inactions impact the broader community when managing your allocated slots. Also note the MRRC tracks all behavior associated with the calendar and takes your compliance with this and all other calendar policy into account when awarding future reserved time.
3. Reminder about the red phone in the waiting room
The technologists do not always have time to look for your arrival, especially when the MRRC is short staffed. There is a red phone in the MRRC waiting room you can use to contact the techs to tell us you have arrived with the participant. This phone connects to the scanner control rooms. Using this phone is a great alternative to waiting until someone comes looking for you.
Best regards and happy holidays to everyone,
Andrew Reineberg
and on behalf of the MRRC Advisory Council
