Transcript:

I’m very grateful to have you on this podcast, and I just want to say thank you for taking the time to tell me about what you do. I want to be able to let people know that your business exists, because I don’t think a lot of people are tuned into rural healthcare. Let’s get started.

Well, thank you so much for having me, because I feel like I have a lot to say.

I think I think you DO have a lot to say and I know that you have been working with Excalibur successfully through other work, and I want you to tell me all about your new entrepreneurial venture, Rural Imaging Services. This is a podcast, it is public, so no one else in the world knows you…if you could start off by telling me your name and the name of your business and we can go from there. 

Well, my name is Brianne Boyd. I recently opened Rural Imaging Services in September 2023 this year. It’s a mobile ultrasound company. I purchased my own machine, my own van. We got contracts at hospitals. Right now I’m actually in the parking lot at Cascade Medical in Washington getting my machine set up here. And I’ve been doing ultrasound for 17 years. I graduated from Seattle University. It’s the only bachelor diagnostic ultrasound program in the state of Washington.

I’m calling from New Jersey, so we’re in a very densely populated area here. Unless you live in a rural area people might not know exactly how people get the care they need in places like rural Washington. Are you native to where you’re performing your services? Did you grow up in in rural Washington? 

I grew up in town of Omak, population of maybe 7000 people. If you want to google it, we have the world famous Suicide Race. You go to the hospital. Unless it’s emergency. If it’s emergent, they’re gonna have an ambulance waiting for you and you have an hour and a half ambulance ride to Wenatchee. If it’s really emergent they’re gonna have a helicopter waiting for you, airlift to Seattle. That is where we live. So hopefully you don’t have anything emergent happen to you, ever, but we don’t have a hospital that we can just go to and get emergency surgery. That’s the county that we live in and that is where everybody comes to come to the hospital. All the little small towns around us, OK, all the small towns around us have even less than we have, so they don’t have ultrasound, they don’t have MRI, they don’t have CT, and then those smaller communities outside of them have less.

And these are things that I take for granted because I live in a suburb of Philadelphia. I guess to put it in perspective, if I have a emergency room injury… off the top of my head, I can think of three emergency rooms that I can immediately drive to and be there within 15 minutes.  It sounds like I’m stating the obvious, but there’s not a whole lotta people in New Jersey that can identify with not getting the care they need within a short drive. And it’s really eye-opening to just hear someone describe that, when you need emergency care, it’s not immediate.

Specialty care is the same way. We have options, but they’re far away. Because we’re so rural, all the rural people have the same option, so they’re hard to get into. 

OK. How did you decide to become a mobile ultrasound business owner?

Well, a lot of things happened at one time, but we had an ER provider that worked at several different facilities. He said “thought about traveling?” and put the idea in my head. And then I just start talking to my husband about it, looking into it, and realized nobody else in Washington state is doing this. And I live in Washington, I’m from Washington and I have a lot of family spread out through these little tiny towns. So I know that there’s a need for it. Started looking into it and I was just so blown away that nobody else is trying to do this. So I just decided to jump in and go 100%. 

It’s not like traveling nurses though, where you just show up and work. You have a very serious piece of technological equipment that you needed to acquire. I can’t picture an ultrasound machine. Is it something that you load into a truck and then bring to the facility? Do people climb into your truck and get… what’s going on? 

No. I have a scheduled day at my site. 

I schedule the patient, I unload my machine, my patient they charge the patient insurance. I charge the hospital so I don’t have to deal with any of that. load up my machine and drive home OK or onto the next facility correct or onto the next facility depending on the schedule that day this morning I was at a facility and did a couple patients and now I’m at a different facility getting set up because I’ll be getting here in a couple weeks

What was one of the bigger challenges getting started? Are there many people doing what you do or are you pretty unique? 

Well, my biggest was the fact that all of my background is ultrasound and not in business and I’m learning every day that was a challenge. What got you into medical imaging? Is it your passion or do you have a story behind that, my patience are my drive for what I do I love them they they they make my day I tried to make theirs so I think I just always been drawn to helping people and that is really why I started this company because that where I was working I was being able to help maybe 4 to 5 patients a day and I feel like I can help so many more people on a bigger spectrum I can I can bring ultrasound to people That have no access to it. I can bring ultrasound to people with no insurance they can’t afford it I can I can I can bring it to if I need to I can help so many more people doing it the way I’m doing it now that I could ever doing it in a hospital 

That’s wonderful.

Ultrasound are really expensive so if you only have the tiny hospital and their populations 5000 they can’t afford to pay somebody $75,000 a year when they’re probably only gonna see maybe some patients a month because they’re so little which means they’re patient populations though which means their numbers are gonna be low so They can’t afford to hire me full-time so all patients are having to drive hours and hours or wait forever to get these exams but they can hire me for one day a month right they can afford ultrasound tech one day a month and then they don’t have to drive they don’t have to wait forever, so I’m still even though I’m in the hospital I’m still helping a bigger group of people 

When did you when you realize that that you could spend one day in one place and another day at another place? I guess spreading the Kare around was that something you knew could happen and you just needed to get to that place would you have liked to have been doing it this whole time? Do you feel like if you felt like you it sounds like if you had done it sooner but yeah, for all kinds of reasons things just happened and you know at the pace that they do and I’m just very glad that that you’re doing this now. It sounds like it sounds like you’re in a wonderful place and you’re you’re only going to get better and help more people with your business.

That is what I feel in my heart. 

Where do you see five years from now?

Five years from now? I see myself…I see Rural Imaging Services expanding…into a company…more work…more sonographers.

If you were not an ultrasound tech, what job do you think you would like to have?

A party planner.

OK. I don’t think those two things are that far off in terms of like in terms of planning. It sounds like a lot of fun but it’s a whole lot of scheduling and organizing. 

But you’re around people. 

OK.

You make people happy. 

Yeah. 

Yeah.

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