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Viewpoints - Clinical engineers speak out on training, new equipment, OEMs

by Christina Hwang, Contributing Reporter | May 18, 2016
HTM Parts And Service
From the May 2016 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine

Medical equipment and health IT are becoming increasingly intertwined in modern hospitals. For health care technology management professionals, this trend has led to some drastic changes to the work they do — and keeping up with the changes is crucial to remaining valuable to the facilities they serve.

Workloads have increased. Understanding network architecture is now important. Even attending webinars has become a prominent activity. To gain insight into the evolving world of clinical engineering, HealthCare Business News interviewed various professionals in health care technology management, including:

• Gary Barkov, clinical engineering multisite manager at Advocate Health Care and vice president of the Clinical Engineering Association of Illinois.
• Raju Bharaj, clinical engineer at Good Shepherd Hospital in Barrington, Illinois.
• Izabella Gieras, clinical technology director at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, California.
• Stuart Grogan, radiology equipment manager at Medical Center Boulevard in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
• Patrick Harning, division vice president of clinical engineering at Catholic Health Initiatives in Erlanger, Kentucky.
• Heidi Horn, vice president of clinical engineering service at SSM Health in St. Louis.
• Joseph Kaminski, director of imaging services at Geisinger Clinical Engineering in Danville, Pennsylvania.
• Russ Magoon, imaging service engineer at Legacy Health in Portland, Oregon.
• Rob Maliff, director, applied solutions group at ECRI Institute in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania.
• Courtney Nanney, national quality manager, clinical engineering, physical asset services at Catholic Health Initiatives in Louisville, Kentucky.
• Curt Rodriguez, clinical engineering and device integration at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

HCB News: How have your day-today activities changed because of EMRs and EHRs?
Stuart Grogan:
My team takes care of the imaging equipment from purchase through installation, and maintenance of it. The main way it’s changed is we have more rules and regulations around making sure the equipment doesn’t contain any EMRs before it leaves the facility. If it’s a retired device or a demo, we are very conscious about medical records getting out without our authorization. We have also become more aware of the potential for imaging systems to be “hacked." We are currently putting measures in place to prevent this.

Heidi Horn:As far as day-to-day, I would say the biggest impact is when data does not appear to be flowing from the medical device into the EMR. The first thing people think is that it’s a medical device problem, so they call us all the time, when most of the time, quite frankly, it’s an issue with the middleware, or the EMR itself. We find ourselves having to disprove to IT that there’s an issue on their side.

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