From the May 2014 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


HCBN: Have the actions and initiatives undertaken by CMS in recent years regarding maintenance rules and requirements changed your workload and responsibilities? Do you anticipate a change and if so, in what ways will it change?

Frederick McMurtrie, clinical biomedical engineering supervisor for Broward Health Medical Center; immediate past president of the Florida Biomedical Society: Yes, from my standpoint, I have seen a direct impact on my job here at Broward Health. The CMS Directive that was issued in December of 2011 is filtering down to the State inspectors and they have to start to ask more direct questions. In some case, as with us at Broward Health, they rejected the risk-based assessments that we had used successfully for years.


Of course, after the industry pushed back, CMS changed its position to accepting risk-base under certain condition and has laid those exceptions out in a letter sent out December of 2013. However, it will take years for the damage to be undone since a lot of departments, if they have been cited previously, will be reluctant to be burned twice. This is a shame because the monies redirected to pay for unnecessary inspections are taking dollars away for more meaningful use in the patient care areas or for more imposing problems like alarm management for example.

Patrick Lynch: CMS is struggling to understand what we do. By not being professional maintenance people, they do not understand how we constantly tweak our procedures and frequencies based upon the evidence we find in our facilities. If they are not careful, they will add a lot of cost to health care without adding any commensurate benefits. Their mandates to follow manufacturer procedures without mandating the providing of those procedures to hospitals reflects the political nature of their actions, bowing to the super-large medical imaging manufacturers.

Rus Magoon: It hasn’t greatly changed my workload, but it has changed the workload of some of the technicians in my hospital slightly. I don’t know if we ever want to completely follow manufacturer guidelines because some of the documentation, we can’t even lay our hands on. For imaging and radiology, we do follow the manufacturer’s guidelines, but a full-on PM — some of them require the system to be down for two days to follow the guidelines they call for — no radiology manager will let their system be down for that long.

Steve Vanderzee: For the most part, imaging and lasers never really had alternative maintenance. There may have been some minor things that we deviated from in the past, but it’s only about 20 percent of our equipment. The recent changes, before there was no clarity. We were in a holding pattern, so it wasn’t affecting us because we were waiting for further direction, waiting to see CMS’ response to the information AAMI submitted. But we also found that we were doing more than what we needed to be doing. We don’t anticipate the new guidance will have a significant impact on us. We’ll have to get better on the imaging side to make sure we’re following the recommendations, but I don’t believe it’ll be any significant hardship.

May 2014 Magazine

Read more stories from the May 2014 issue

More Magazine Features

More Voices