In July, 2025, Keith McAllister died in an MRI accident at Nassau Open MRI that was both anticipatable and preventable. What has the State of New York done in the intervening year to make MRI safer in their state? This episode tries to answer that question, and gives you a sneak-peek at our upcoming episodes.
The New York State Department of Health gaslit our hosts, pretending there was an investigation into the fatal MRI accident when there wasn’t one. When pressed on these details, they froze us out, so we resorted to a Freedom of Information Law request. After almost six-months, they finally responded to our request on what the state is doing to provide some minimum level of MRI safety to New Yorkers…
Despite reports of ‘following the events,’ and ‘ongoing investigations,’ and ‘attention to safety,’ we can’t say what – if anything – the NYSDOH is doing to help make MRI scans safer for New Yorkers. We can say, however, that Invisible Force will be doing new series on the MRI accident at Westchester Medical Center in which Michael Colombini died, as well as one on an accident at Redwood City Hospital where a nurse was trapped against an MRI scanner by an ICU bed.
Show Notes:
NY State Department of Health FOIL response
NY State Public Officer Law §87
KTVU (San Francisco) News Story on Nurse – ICU Bed MRI accident
Transcript:
“We apologize for the delay in response. Thank you for reaching out to the department. Unfortunately, we’re unable to provide information at this time due to ongoing investigations.”
“I’d like to learn more about the authority through which New York State Department of Health is conducting an investigation since your office previously indicated they don’t have jurisdiction.”
“We are still having active internal discussions on this, but I should have an answer for you next week.”
“Can you please provide me with any information you may have or an updated timeline?”
“When it was noted that the issue was under investigation, this was in reference to our internal review to provide you with an eventual response. This was not an official investigation.”
Hello, and welcome to the final episode in the first series of the Invisible Force podcast. This podcast series is built around exploring MRI incidents and accidents that often get described incorrectly in local news or in online stories as freak accidents.
This entire first series, which we’re now wrapping up, at least for the time being, this has been dedicated to an accident you’ve heard about in the news. A man who died in an MRI accident out on Long Island, New York, almost a year ago in July of 2025. In this accident, Mr. Keith McAllister died after he got pulled into an MRI scanner by a 20-pound chain around his neck. This happened at Nassau Open MRI.
But before we pick up our story from the prior episodes, this is a great time to reintroduce you to the co-hosts for our podcast.
I’m John Posh, MRI technologist, educator, and longtime advocate of MRI safety practices.
I’m Toby Gilk, certified MRSO and MRSE, safety consultant and co-author of a new MRI safety textbook.
I think we’ve covered almost everything that we know up to this point, the who, the what, the where, and when. But there’s one piece of promised content for now, in June of 2026, that we hadn’t yet delivered to you. This accident happened in New York State. It made international news. So surely, the fact that an anticipatable and preventable MRI accident took place at a health care provider when the state required exactly zero MRI safety minimum preventions, surely, after the state of New York laid claim to its second infamous MRI fatality here in the United States, surely that would prompt some sort of action at the state level to help protect New Yorkers in the future, right?
Well, that’s what this episode is all about. But before we get to New York specifically, let’s take a moment to identify what national standards exist that the states as state survey agencies on behalf of the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, are responsible for enforcing during surveys and certificate activities. While CMS doesn’t explicitly require it, the built-in presumption is that the states have state-level authority to look at the quality and safety issues with minimum criteria that even if they don’t match CMS exactly, are close enough that there’s a good indication that the health care provider is meeting CMS quality and safety minimums.
For most of radiology and all of nuclear medicine, this is in fact the case. Every state in the union has state regulations about the control of exposures to ionizing radiation sources. The type of radiation that comes from X-rays and PET scans, these state standards on ionizing radiation, they very closely parallel both national and international standards on ionizing radiation exposure, the accuracy of radiation dose, and the overall aim of keeping radiation exposures a Lara, which is as low as reasonably achievable. If you were CMS, you’d have no reason to question whether New York or any state, for that matter, was following through on minimum quality and safety standards for ionizing radiation, because they all do it. And they all have very similar ionizing radiation standards.
But it’s also true that the US states have remarkably similar – to one another anyway – MRI safety standards, but only similar in the respect that none of the states have any MRI safety standards. So now, if you were CMS and you were looking at the state’s ability to meet the federal safety objectives, such as must meet professionally approved standards for safety, or that radiologic services must be free from hazards for patients and personnel, with respect to MRI, there’s zero evidence that the states are able to do that with respect to MRI. This is exactly where New York State is. The state’s healthcare licensing laws fail to acknowledge that MRI even exists, much less that there are any state safety standards for it.
Now, we previously mentioned how this isn’t the first high-profile fatal MRI accident in New York. 25 years ago, in 2001, a young boy named Michael Colombini died when a steel oxygen tank was brought into the MRI scanner room. It went flying and it struck the young boy in the head. That incident was splashed across headlines and 24-hour news coverage of the day. It was, in a word, inescapable. Now, in the second half of the episode, we’re going to have something more to share with you about this particular accident, so make sure you stay tuned. The New York State Department of Health actually investigated this prior incident and even noted how they didn’t really have MRI safety standards at the time. Even if the Colombini accident and MRI safety standards disappeared from the state’s consciousness immediately after that accident, we figured there absolutely had to be some sort of, oh crap moment when within New York government, after the Keith McAllister fatal MRI accident, people rethought. Previously, we described how we’ve reached out to every part of the New York state government that we could think of at least to ask about this accident, to ask what was the state thinking about the current lack of any minimum MRI safety regulations or what changes were being considered?
We contacted the New York state governor’s office asking to speak with a health policy aide or staffer or someone who could talk to us. Actually, we contacted the governor’s office several times because we got no response to our initial requests. Two months later, we got a governor regretfully declines email. We reached out to the office of the chair of the New York Senate Health Committee, Senator Gustavo Rivera, asking to speak with a policy aide. For months, we were promised a call or an email within a week to schedule a time with the policy advisor. Eventually, we were told that the senator’s office wasn’t interested in the subject and that no meeting would happen. We were simultaneously doing the same thing with the chair of the Assembly Health Committee, Assemblymember Amy Paulin. After many months, we did eventually get a meeting with Rachel Morris, a policy aide for Assemblymember Paulin. That conversation appeared to go as well as it possibly could have with Ms. Morris expressing both concern and interest. But a couple of months later, the hopes were crushed with the terse message, quote, “the Assemblymember is not interested,” unquote.
At the same time that all of this was being done with the governor and the state senate and the state assembly, we were also trying to get information directly from the New York State Department of Health. Calls to the main number for the Department of Health. Well, the person there kept on telling us to send emails to their “hospinfo”info email address, that this was somehow the only way to identify the proper contacts or to get our questions answered. All in all, we probably sent a dozen emails to that address over several months. Not one of which was ever acknowledged or answered. So, with the help of some friends who could point us to individuals within the Bureau of Environmental and Radiation Protection, or BERP, the most-unfortunately-acronymed department in the world, we wound up speaking with the director, Charles Burns, who acknowledged the accident and expressed concern over the complete absence of State of New York MRI safety standards. He indicated that if there were conversations about state-level responses to the accident, that those conversations didn’t involve him. And he ultimately pointed us to a contact in the Office of Governmental and External Affairs, and that contact was Alyssa DeRosa.
Mr. DeRosa, after ignoring our inquiries for several weeks, eventually tried to sidestep any kind of response by telling us that the department was unable to provide information at this time due to ‘ongoing investigations,’ period. If she thought that this was going to placate us, it had the exact opposite effect. For months, the Department of Health had been telling us that they had no jurisdiction, and now she said that this event was under investigation. We followed up asking, what changed? That they now felt they had jurisdiction to investigate, and what part of the New York State Department of Health was actually running the investigation? She strung us along for another month or two with, quote, we are looking into these questions, unquote, and, quote, we are still having active internal discussions, unquote.
Eventually, we learned from Nicole Katz, who is presumably Ms. DeRosa’s supervisor, that Ms. DeRosa had kind of been gaslighting us. There was, in fact, no investigation, at least not into the incident, no investigation that kept them from providing information. Instead, the department’s, quote, unquote, investigation was reportedly them internally reviewing their jurisdiction, which, again, held that New York State Department of Health had none. When we asked Ms. Katz the same question that we’ve been asking Ms. DeRosa for months, what conversations are happening within the state about a need or desire for MRI safety standards, ultimately she pawned us off on the department’s press office and after weeks of delay in postponement in January, we got another terse email. The department takes patient and provider safety seriously and we are closely monitoring the developments related to this event but have no further comments at this time.
Even before we got to this point, we had grown to expect evasion, deflection and non-answers from the New York State Department of Health. As a hedge against this empty response, in December, we submitted a freedom of information law or FOIL request to the New York State Department of Health. If the Department of Health staffers were going to gaslight us and pawn us off on others who could do the no comment, bad guy role, we’d see if we could use the law to get information about what was happening. With all the previous described, quote, we are looking into these questions and quote, we are still having active internal discussions, there had to be a real substantive debate about what the state should be doing about MRI safety, right?
So, just a few days before Christmas last year, we submitted that FOIL request, asking for a bunch of different Department of Health records on a few different topics. We asked them for the identification and exploration of New York State regulation, or the lack thereof, for MRI safety at the point of care. We asked for the circumstances surrounding the fatal MRI accident that occurred on Long Island in July of 2025, in which Mr. Keith McAllister died. We asked for information about the discussions of state investigations into the incident, and we asked for all discussions of potential or actual state responses to this incident.
The original response date for our request was January 22nd. This got pushed to March 9th, then to April 20th, and then again to June 2nd. Just barely in time for this final installment of the series. The Records Access Office was another six days late providing us the documents only last week, June 8th. But after almost six months of waiting, we were finally going to get a peek behind the curtain to learn what actions were being discussed in the New York Department of Health about the Nassau Open MRI incident specifically, and the need to protect New Yorkers seeking MRI care more generally.
We’ve done freedom of information requests before, and we were expecting reams and reams of e-mails and correspondents and memos and reports. But after months of gathering and reviewing material, what the New York State Department of Health sent us just absolutely floored us.
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Before the break, we kind of left you hanging with our shocked response to what we got from our FOIL request, requested from the New York State Department of Health. Our request had asked for a lot of information about the Nassau Open MRI accident, as well as the state of New York’s response to that accident and broader approach to MRI safety. We were bracing ourselves for the likelihood that we were going to get buried in documents needing a metaphoric bulldozer for the volume of PDFs that we would get. I was expecting, especially since they were late on producing the documents, that we’d be up all night for a few nights, struggling to extract the useful bits to synthesize this all for you in this, our last planned episode on the McAllister series.
It turns out that in New York, there’s something called the Public Officers’ Law that has a number of very generous to the state anyway, carve-outs, which are allowable exceptions to the disclosures that would otherwise be required by the state’s FOIL law. Section 87, Part 2, Subsection G in particular, exempts the state from having to provide anything that is internal or interagency records that aren’t straight up data or numbers, aren’t communications from the agency to the public, or aren’t final agency policy determinations. If it doesn’t land in one of those three buckets, the state of New York doesn’t need to turn it over.
So, what was in the FOIL response that the New York State Department of Health sent us? I was expecting hundreds, if not thousands of pages of document, but what we got was instead a 26-page PDF that was almost entirely our emails to them. It even appears as though the Department of Health blacked out or redacted parts of email replies from Department of Health employees to us in our emails. Apart from a couple of letters sent to us and our emails to the department, the only other produced document was an email gentleman by the name of Robert LaCroix who was asking for a copy of the state’s incident report. This was the first time we’d ever done a FOIL request to the New York State Department of Health. And when I got the response, I was just absolutely white-hot with frustration that the state would exempt effectively everything that we were after. We presume that the public officer law exemption that the department identified in their FOIL response to us wiped out everything that would have given us an indication of whether MRI was going to somehow, someway, start to get a little bit safer in New York.
As we’ve repeated in every episode, our goal is not only to tell this story, but also to effect changes that make these sorts of anticipatable and preventable MRI accidents less likely to happen. We’re quickly coming up on the one-year anniversary of the McAllister-Nassau Open MRI accident, and we have to say that, as of today, we have no idea if the people in the state of New York are any closer to getting rules, standards, licensure requirements, or anything that has any sort of MRI safety measures that will make these exams safer in the state of New York. But if you think that this means the two of us are waving the flag of surrender, then we haven’t successfully communicated to you just how bullheaded each of us is. When it comes to MRI safety, we’re both laser focused on results even if it takes years of grinding work to get them.
You may have noticed that the title of this episode is Au Revoir, which is French for ‘Until We See Each Other Again.’ It’s meant to signal two promises from us at the Invisible Force. Promise number one is that while we’re drawing the telling of the McAllister story to a close, it’s really more of an indefinite pause than an end. When we get more information, we will do follow up episodes. We’re going to keep up after the New York State Department of Health, after state legislators and anybody with responsibility for making sure that the state’s role for CMS meets minimum MRI safety conditions of participation. We’re going to keep up with the lawsuit, the depositions, discovery and affidavits that get filed with the court that may help shed light on exactly what happened. When there is a critical mass of new facts, we’ll come back to this series with a new episode. If we had just wrapped up series four, for example, and then all of a sudden you see a new episode entitled series one, episode 13 in your feed, now you’ll understand what that means.
The second promise is that you’re not going to have to wait months or years for significant episode worthy updates to the McAllister story to hear from the two of us again. Maybe you did something awful in a previous life, but you apparently had the ongoing penance of listening to us further. Continuing at our same pace, immediately after this episode, we’re starting to work on a three-episode series on the MRI accident that kicked off a broad awareness of MRI safety in the United States, the 2001 Colombini incident. This is the accident in which a young boy was killed when a steel oxygen tank was brought into the MRI scanner room. The final episode of that three-part series is planned to be released during MRI Safety Week, the week of July 27th. If you didn’t know, MRI Safety Week is always the week that includes July 27th, which is the anniversary date of the Colombini accident. This year, 2026, is the 25th anniversary of that accident.
After our three-part reflection on the Colombini accident, we’re going to take you on a long look at an accident that occurred in California in 2023, where a nurse got pinned against an MRI scanner by an ICU bed. The nurse was horribly injured.
“The hospital bed was pulled uncontrollably into the MRI machine by its magnetic force. A nurse became pinned between the bed and the machine, reports say. She suffered crushing injuries. The patient fell to the floor.”
“I was getting pushed by the bed. Basically, I was running backwards. If I didn’t run, the bed would smash me underneath.”
You may have seen pictures of this accident with an enormous hospital bed stuck to the MRI scanner. It was absolutely making the rounds in the radiology community after this accident happened in 2023. Because this accident occurred at a hospital that participates in CMS reimbursement programs, it was subject to investigation from CMS. Additionally, because the person injured was a hospital employee, there was also an OSHA investigation. Both the CMS and OSHA investigations are public record. So we have a great deal more official investigatory findings for this incident than we have had available to us in the past year for the McAllister incident.
But that’s not to say that everything related to the ICU bed incident is in the can. We’re still actively digging up information on the threatened civil litigation from the nurse who had been pinned and was lucky to survive with her life. As with the Long Island incident, we also have quite a number of off-the-book sources for this incident too. People who have helped us build a better understanding, well, better than came from the TV news accounts or the official investigations alone. Altogether, the collection of sources and our relentless public records requests have given us a remarkably good picture of this 2003 accident. Unlike Nassau Open MRI, there isn’t any video, but there certainly are some eye-popping revelations. So look for this series to start in August.
We also want to close out this final episode for now, at least, in the McAllister series with a personal message from us to Mrs. Jones-McAllister. Beyond anything else, we want to express our sadness that this foreseeable and preventable accident happened and took Keith from you. We also want you to know that if you are ever interested in seeing that there are minimum point of care MRI safety standards in New York or throughout the US, we will be pleased to work with you to help make that happen.
“We apologize for the delay in response. Thank you for reaching out to the department. Unfortunately, we’re unable to provide information at this time due to ongoing investigations.”
“I’d like to learn more about the authority through which New York State Department of Health is conducting an investigation since your office previously indicated they don’t have jurisdiction.”
“We are still having active internal discussions on this, but I should have an answer for you next week.”
“Can you please provide me with any information you may have or an updated timeline?”
“When it was noted that the issue was under investigation, this was in reference to our internal review to provide you with an eventual response. This was not an official investigation.”
We want to thank you, our loyal and growing listener base, for joining us for the telling of the story as best we know it today about the MRI death of Mr. Keith McAllister at Nassau Open MRI. We look forward to having you join us for our upcoming series, starting with the MRI accident that effectively launched MRI safety.
If you work for a hospital or imaging center, we also want to remind you to recognize MRI Safety Week, the week of July 27th. Celebrate your site’s MRI safety improvements and rededicate yourself and your team to the ongoing work that is MRI safety.
For this week’s show, our sources were about a thousand emails and voicemails, and a few conversations with various parts of the New York State Executive and Legislative branches, as well as the 26 pages of our own emails that the New York State Department of Health was gracious enough to give back to us in response to our FOIL request from December.
In our introduction to the upcoming ICU bed series, we played for you excerpts from a KTVU news story about the incident. Our little introductory audio play, which recreated some of our interactions with the New York State Department of Health people, well, that was voiced by Amanda McLaughlin, Julia Shafini and myself.
If you have any information about the McAllister MRI accident – or any MRI accidents – please reach out to us through our website, invisibleforcepodcast.com. There you’ll find episodes and show notes, tip line, contact information. They’re always there. Also, you’re welcome to leave us a voicemail with information about MRI incidents and the tip line is 631-MRI-TIPS. The number again is 631-MRI-TIPS or 631-674-8477.
Finally, we ask you to like and share our podcast with your friends, colleagues and coworkers. We look forward to sharing our next stories with you about MRI accidents and how to prevent them and how together with a little luck, we’re going to help make sure that accidents like this don’t ever occur again.
