From the May 2014 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


The one section that troubles me is that it could restrict hospitals that want to go with alternative service — we’re unsure whether we can use the system’s source of evidence-based service. So are we only able to use only our own personal evidence-base or can we use information provided by other sources — ECRI or another similar-sized organization for instance. If I go to another organization with 5,000 infusion pumps from Alaris, can I go to another system with that number and use that knowledge?

HCBN: Do you believe that CMS’ changes, if enacted to the extent they’ve desired, would cost hospitals more or less or will they not have an impact on the bottom line?

Horace Hunter, executive director of the Georgia Biomedical Instrumentation Society: Hospitals that have not been using good technical management strategies will be impacted the worst. The biggest impact will be a demand to have OEMs to service the equipment in a contract.



Scott Bosch: Considering the resistance of the HTM community to CMS’ changes, it’s evident that it will affect everyone’s bottom line (by costing more) to some degree. The facilities that are familiar with change and can absorb more tasks will be less affected.

Ron Padgett: CMS is nothing but a large political government machine and changes are and will be expensive to hospitals.

HCBN: Are there any skills that health technology management as a group will need to improve — be it managerial or technical — to thrive in the developing health care environment?

Greg Mika: The biggest thing that I see for technicians and probably management is more and more understanding of computer networking and wireless and all that technology connection. We need to understand a lot of the terminology going on to work with IT to make it work. It’s hard to communicate with them if you don’t know the terminology. Having that knowledge is almost a 100 percent requirement in my opinion. So taking networking and network security classes will be beneficial.

Heidi Horn: From a technical standpoint, IT skills are no longer “nice to have skills.” They are a necessity. Most clinical devices already have some programming component, and in a few years, almost every clinical device will be interfaced in some way to the network, wireless network, other hardware, clinical software or an electronic medical record. It’s hard to train HTM technicians on information technology. It’s almost impossible to train an IT person on how to be a BMET/clinical engineer. I now have at least one clinical engineer who is an IT “expert” at every one of our hospitals. It’s a source of constant amusement to me to see the look on some IT staff person’s face when they realize a clinical engineer knows as much about their IT equipment as they do. All amusement aside, though, it helps tremendously on projects when my team can talk IT with the IT people and both sides understand the IT security, infrastructure, support and cost implications of a project.

May 2014 Magazine

Read more stories from the May 2014 issue

More Magazine Features

More Voices