Levente Németh, when he heard how long he would have to wait for an MRI scan, started counting. In Szanyon he set up the country's first village diagnostic centre.

What can a man with claustrophobia do before he is admitted for an MRI scan? He takes a sedative or drinks a brandy. The advice is not from the head doctor of a private clinic in Budapest, but from agricultural engineer Levente Németh. I had just arrived at the sound of the noon bell in Szany, a village on the banks of the Rába - and on the border of three counties - in the Little Plain. He owns the MR diagnostics centre here.

You can't miss the sign on the side of the road, but Levente was particularly pleased that I'd found it. "Google even shows the house next door as 65, and this one as 67. We've already written to them," he said.

Rubber boots in the office

The 41-year-old owner had time to think about whether it was worth investing in an MRI machine. Five or six years ago he applied for a scan at a public hospital, when he faced a waiting list of between six and 12 months. Now he says he's heard of waits of a year and a half, but he didn't build the centre in Sanyi because he had to wait so long. Rather, he finds it food for thought:

He is confident that the investment will pay off.

At first glance, Levente looked like a typical small lowland farmer: olive-green T-shirt, direct greeting and some dialect. But when he entered the office, the only reminder of his farming background was an olive-green rubber boot (with the marker NL MR, 2023.09.09).

This year, he obtained his third degree and can now call himself a precision agriculture engineer. He is also a crop protection engineer and an agricultural engineer with decades of experience. He is the inquisitive type: for a long time he was the first person to ask me back and I was able to talk to him about Forbes.

A hundred million dollar business

"Stables and barns," the owner quipped when asked what the place was before it was turned into a diagnostic centre. "In the front was the apartment building, there was the boiler room, and here was the barn," he points around. No animals have lived here in recent years, but a patch of dirt at the end of the house and a road marker indicate there is still work to be done.

While the experience of the first three weeks at the MR centre is important, after a career change like this, I'm primarily interested in the investment and the return. At first Levente didn't want to tell me how much the MR machine from the US had cost, but then he let it slip with a small laugh:

"Well... nine figures."

He didn't calculate the return on the investment of hundreds of millions of euros on chequered paper, but he calculated it in the ten-year perspective that is customary in agriculture. For the time being, they work out cheaper than the 50-100 thousand forints for MR scans that are typical of private providers.

"I don't want to get rich overnight: we will keep these prices as long as we can. But the machine consumes a lot of electricity, so how long we can keep it depends on energy prices. It cost a lot to introduce 200 amps three times."

- said Levente. As a contractor, he doesn't benefit from any overheads rebate, and the market cost of electricity is in the millions of euros a month - and that's just the machine's consumption.

Is MRI tourism coming?

The ambitious plans are based not only on Levente's self-confidence, but also on the fact that there is no other private provider of MRI diagnostics in the Győr-Szombathely-Veszprém triangle. This is also evident from the fact that the Facebook page launched at the beginning of September has more followers than the entire population of the village after a few weeks. The centre, less than 40 minutes from Burgenland, could also appeal to people living across the border. "Predictability is important to us.

If someone makes an appointment for 8am, they can leave here at 8:45am and get to work. You might also get an appointment at the state hospital for 8 a.m., but you might not leave there until 8 p.m."

- Levente said. Several visitors, including elderly ladies and young men, indicated while I was there that they were grateful for this opportunity.

But for now, appointments can only be made by phone or email. The website is still so rudimentary that I could not find any general terms and conditions on it, and the booking system is not clickable.

"We are way ahead of the IT people, the booking system will be improved soon," said Levente. For this reason, the images are given to patients on a CD, but he promised that later they will be available for download from the website in unlimited numbers. They have signed a contract with Iconomix, Hungary's largest teleradiology company, where more than a hundred doctors can examine incoming images in their speciality. When I am surprised at the number, Levente confirms, "There are plenty of good specialists in Hungary."

Loud and cold

The next patient, who arrives with a knee brace, is already an experienced MRI visitor: he has been to Győr, Veszprém and Budapest.

"This morning I typed in MRI Szany, phoned and was told to come at half past one. It's a quarter of an hour from Pápa."

- he said of why he came to the village from the town of nearly 30,000. When I ask what it's like to be examined by such a machine, he says it's loud and cold.

Before his inspection, I was able to look closely at the (several) hundred million forints worth of machinery, but not too closely. As with airport security, metal is not allowed through the threshold because of the electromagnetic field. The temperature in the examination room was indeed 19 degrees, the environment in which patients lie in the narrow tube for 15-20 minutes. "I was the first to lie down after the machine arrived. I tried it several times, but it's not as harmful as a CT scan or an X-ray. At the time of the set-up, it took an hour per scan," recalls Levente.

Patients can be helped not only by a sedative or brandy, but also by a relative holding their hand - or their leg, if they are having their upper body examined. "The joint examination is easier, it doesn't usually cause anxiety. The skull and neck is the most difficult, because the patient can't talk," the assistant pointed out. And some examinations require intravenous contrast material, which can be found out during the examination.  

We also went into the machine room, where the star of the show is a piece of equipment reminiscent of 1960s computers: the MRI brain. The machine, which is larger than a human, needs a separate cooling unit, and the liquid helium needed for the MRI scan is cooled by a separate machine.

Saturday will not be free

Levente was still a smallholder farmer after his first degree in 2006 and set up his first business the following year. He was involved in crop production, contract farming and self-propelled spraying. The latter is a hot topic in agriculture, and he had a long discussion with one of his patients about why it was too early to expect drones to take over the fields. He is also involved in road construction and cleaning. "We dug fishing ponds with excavators, did mechanical earthworks, cut bushes along roads," he says, listing the things he has done.

He founded NL Medical Ltd on 17 April, so little business data is yet available on the health line. For now, his plans for 2024 exist only in his head.

"When we stand at the end of the field and start harvesting the corn, I can never tell how much will come up. We wait until the end of the year to estimate," the owner said. He's sure he won't buy another machine.

"It's not like a trucking company where you buy another car when you outgrow the first one. Rather, we're preparing to extend our hours into the evening on weekdays and put in a Saturday."