by
Loren Bonner, DOTmed News Online Editor | May 09, 2013
From the May 2013 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
The Association of Medical Instrumentation has accomplished a lot this past year, according to president and CEO Mary Logan. She shared some of the details with DOTmed Business News, and also spoke about what’s in store for this year’s annual conference, taking place June 1-3 in Long Beach, Calif.
DMBN: Since your conversation with DOTmed News last year, what have been the big AAMI updates?
ML: The overriding theme in the past 12 months was “resiliency.” We didn’t know when we started 2012 that we would have an opportunity to do collaborative standards development with UL; we didn’t know that we would be submitting over 200 pages of data to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in June; and we didn’t anticipate being asked to host a wireless workshop. Our great staff and volunteer teams made it possible for us to be nimble and redirect our efforts where needed most.
My top five favorite accomplishments of 2012 were: 1) the AAMI/UL agreement to develop a suite of device interoperability standards; 2) the progress that our fledgling Healthcare Technology Safety Institute has made, including receiving its first important grant from the CareFusion Foundation to study infusion errors; 3) hosting the AAMIFDA Interoperability Summit and then the adjacent Wireless Workshop; 4) our record-setting annual conference; and 5) our data-driven leadership on the CMS preventive maintenance issue with the HTM community.
And, we have our work cut out for us this year with some big= projects: a home health care summit with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration; follow-up work with CMS on preventive maintenance strategies; a wireless task force to start follow-up work from last year’s wireless workshop; follow-up work from last year’s Future Forum II; the unveiling of a new and improved AAMI online store; the release of the core curriculum for health care technology management (HTM) professionals the development of some big new standards; and a major new industry education initiative.
DMBN: AAMI seems to partner often with the FDA to co-host educational events for members. Why is this relationship important and what do you think members gain from it?
ML: The FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) regulates medical devices. Their perspective on the safety of medical devices is critical to everything we do at AAMI, starting with standards development.
The summits that we co-convene with the FDA are for the entire health care community, not just for AAMI members. We strongly believe that technology issues in health care are not solved well when they are solved alone by regulators, industry, HTM professionals, clinicians, or others. The entire system of health care must work together to solve what are essentially sociotechnical issues. We bring the community together and the magic happens in the room when the multi-disciplinary stakeholders begin to discuss technology-related problems. This year, we will co-convene our 6th summit with the FDA, this one on clinical technology used outside of a clinical environment (also known as home health care).
