For health care technology management (HTM) professionals, 2016 has been a "watershed" year, according to a panel of experts at the Clinical Engineering Association of Illinois (CEAI) conference.

While the speakers lauded the safety record of HTMs, saying they have the best safety records in hospital institutions, they also stressed the importance of not becoming complacent and striving to improve.

Leading efforts in hospital safety by increasing their use of information technologies and moving beyond the “shop” to take on a bigger role in health care organizations as a whole are key ways in which the panelists suggested HTMs may not be realizing their full potential.

George Mills, director of the Engineering Department and the Accreditation Organizations Department at The Joint Commission (TJC), related that customer surveys affirm that clinical engineers have good programs in place and are doing a fine job of managing equipment. “You are doing the right things right,” he said.

“The key sign that we are doing our job is that the phone is not ringing,” added David Francoeur, senior director, program development and support at Sodexo. “This means that there aren’t concerns about the program, but it doesn't mean we shouldn’t be focused on improvement.”

Making sure preventative maintenance is being performed is something most HTM departments take for granted, according to Francoeur, but if compliance is at 99.9 percent he said it is the .1 percent that needs to be dealt with.

Taking a leading role in infection control

The panel agreed that a primary opportunity is in the area of infection control through hand hygiene. To combat statistics indicating as many as 70,000 deaths annually due to HAIs, clinical engineers can take the lead in this remedy.

“Let’s get serious about this through the simple measure of washing our hands,” Mills exhorted. “Be an example in your buildings. Get infection control to your shop, learn how to wash hands properly and show others the way.”

Steve Vanderzee, director of clinical engineering for Advocate Healthcare, seconded Mills. Clinical engineers “are good about it in their shops, but must understand that infection passes via movement within the facility. We should follow the same protocols as clinicians in operating areas.”

Data driven safety

A second opportunity for improvement voiced by the panel is to increasingly incorporate digital tools to measure and assure safety levels.

Mike Busdicker, system director of clinical engineering at Intermountain Healthcare, detailed a comprehensive approach involving reporting systems that allow each staff member, nurse, and doctor to input any and every incident.

This way, databases of all engineering related events can be established and analyzed, so that managers can look for patterns and develop responses. “Every single mechanical incident should be reported through this system, no matter how minor - whether it is a user problem, equipment being dropped, anything.”

It should all be included into a system that generates a report on a weekly basis so we can analyze all of the data, said Busdicker. “There is so much that can be derived from this information for training purposes, program development, as well as responses to suppliers.”

Coming out of the basement to take a place at the organizational table

Aaron Goryl, in-house and on-demand development general manager for GE Healthcare, observed that there is more and more in-house coordination as well as interaction with OEMs, and that this is a good trend. Getting these dialogues to increasingly take place out in the open will ensure that all parties are on the same page.

“It is important that HTM organizations are no longer stuck in the basement but are driving strategies and part of leadership teams. This needs to be increased.” We need to get beyond the “break-fix” model, Goryl continued, “to see how well we are engaging with the organization as a whole.”

Busdicker spoke for the whole panel when he posed the following questions that will help determine the next steps for HTM:

"Have we become more than just the department that fixes equipment? Are we working in areas that are important to the organization? When something new arises do they want us at the table?”

Developments related to the Affordable Care Act have brought about major issues in the industry, Busdicker went on. “When organizations pull together to deal with them, we want clinical engineering to have a seat at the table.” They should see us as a department that is not separate within the organization but a part of an integrated effort to solve problems together.

“We have to be proactive, not reactive, about things that are going on. The new HTM era involves taking things to leadership rather than waiting for them to come to us in the overall effort to improve health care.”