With so much happening in the field, the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation’s president and CEO, Mary Logan, says that this year’s conference is designed as a “must-attend” event. She shared some of the details with DOTmed HealthCare Business News, and spoke about what’s planned for this year’s annual conference, taking place May 31 - June 2, in Philadelphia.

HCBN: What are your top three favorite accomplishments for 2013 and why?

ML: It’s hard to pick just three, but I’ll try! For the entire health care community, AAMI’s most important work in 2013 was the outstanding alarm system management webinar series, which we capped at 3,500 registered sites — a record. What makes me smile the most about this series is the opportunity for multi-disciplinary teams from health care delivery organizations to attend and discuss each webinar. Some sites have had as many as 10 individuals from across the organization sitting in the same room and learning together. That’s an amazing service to the health care community, and we were able to offer it free of charge because we had some dedicated corporate sponsors to underwrite the expenses.



For the health care technology management community, the most important work of AAMI in 2013 was the launch of the “core curriculum” for BMET educational programs. The profession has needed this standardized foundation for educational content, and this document has many uses for individual BMETS for career development as well.

On a more emotional level, the highest note of pride in 2013 was that our Foundation’s Healthcare Technology Safety Institute won two prestigious national awards — the “GE Pioneering Spirit Award” from the American Association of Critical Care Nurses, and a “Cheers” award from the Institute for Safe Medication Practices.

HCBN: You mentioned last year that you’d be working on some big new standards as well as a major industry education initiative. Can you share with us any updates on those topics?

ML: We just assumed responsibility from another organization for a major new standards committee, for anesthesia and respiratory technology. The timing of this new committee coming to AAMI was uncanny, because at around the same time, we decided with the FDA that the 2014 AAMI-FDA Summit topic would be ventilation technology. We also are starting development of a new TIR (Technical Information Report) on low and intermediate disinfection of medical devices, as this was a gap in our portfolio of standards in sterilization and disinfection. We have a new committee that is addressing sustainability issues. They have authored a white paper already and will be developing more substantial material in the coming years. And, the most visible standards work that is moving toward adoption is for the replacement of the Luer Connector. We have published a number of articles about the patient safety issue with the Luer, and I would encourage the HTM community to become familiar with it by looking at the “Hot Topics” page on our website: www. aami.org/hottopics/connectors/index.html

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