Description:
The MRI accident nearly killed a nurse. But in the days afterward, it seemed as if almost nobody wanted to talk about it.

When the Invisible Force began investigating the 2023 MRI accident at Redwood City Hospital, the story was strangely absent from local news—even though photographs of the ICU bed stuck to the MRI scanner were circulating through professional radiology communities.

Hospital employees and other sources described a climate of silence. Then we discovered something even more troubling: a previous MRI projectile accident had apparently occurred at the same hospital—a ventilator pulled into the MRI scanner. What had been learned from that earlier warning? We couldn’t find out.

So we turned to California’s Department of Public Health.

And that’s when the investigation took an unexpected turn…

The state health department appeared not to know about the nurse who had nearly been killed. Our call became the first indication that the accident had occurred at a hospital under its jurisdiction. The complaint was subsequently forwarded to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)—and CMS didn’t simply pass it back to the state to handle.

CMS initially classified the incident as “Immediate Jeopardy.”

What does that mean for a hospital? What happens when CMS determines that an MRI safety failure represents an immediate threat to life or safety? And what does a hospital have to do to avoid losing its Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement?

In this episode, The Invisible Force follows the investigation from the hospital’s silence to federal regulatory scrutiny—and begins uncovering the MRI safety failures, corrective actions, and unanswered questions that would lead us toward separate CMS, OSHA, and California investigations.

This is the story of what happened after the MRI accident—and how much more there was to uncover.

Show Notes:
CMS-2567 “Statement of Deficiencies | Plan of Correction” Report for Redwood City Hospital (8.4 MB)

Transcript: