EDINBURG, RGV – Doctors Hospital at Renaissance sees approximately 50,000 patients every year at its current Imaging Center. With the opening of the new imaging facilities, they hope that number will double.
DHR recently opened its new Health Imaging Center at Dove Avenue in northeast McAllen. The 18,000-square-foot-facility features a variety of services such as ultrasounds, MRIs, CTs and nuclear medicine. Dr. Carlos Cardenas, chairman of the board at DHR, says this center will deliver world class healthcare to everyone in the community.
“[The imaging centers] are putting pieces of the puzzle together for comprehensive women’s health in the Rio Grande Valley,” Cardenas said. “There is no reason why 1.4 million people shouldn’t have access to the same level of care that they have in any other major metropolitan area. Women in our community will no longer have to leave [the region] to receive comprehensive health care particularly when it comes to treating breast cancer.”
According to Melissa Peña Flores, director of radiology, there was a backlog of about two months for patients to be seen at the DHR Women’s Imaging Center on Lindberg Avenue in McAllen. Based on those statistics, DHR saw the need to open up another facility to provide services for those numbers.
“[Two months] is a critical amount of time–you want to be seen. If we knew there was some kind of suspicious finding then we would get patients in right away,” Flores said. “We would stay open late, work weekends and we managed to still take care of our patients, but people still want to get in even if it’s just a screening mammogram. We saw the need to see more patients sooner and give them quicker appointments so they can be diagnosed a lot sooner.”
The new imaging center is the only one south of San Antonio that is accredited under the National Accreditation Program for Breast Centers, Peña Flores said. She said the new DHR Health Imaging Center at Dove will provide full-service digital imaging and diagnostic services, with surgeons housed in the facility for the patients.
