From the May 2014 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


On the business skills side, HTM professionals — especially those in management — must be able to manage their costs and budgets. It’s also a necessity to have project management skills to manage large projects that involve multiple departments and functions, and take weeks, months or years to complete. Due to the fact that we are now being sought out for our medical device expertise at the highest levels of the organization and are now being invited to high-level meetings, HTM professionals are now interacting more with hospital and system administration. Throw away the pocket protector, short sleeved dress shirts and corduroy pants you’ve had for 20 years. Cut off the pony tail. If you want to be treated as the professional you are, you need to look and act the part. That also includes being able to communicate effectively verbally and in writing to all levels of the organization. In my HTM organization, five years ago, we only had two managers with bachelor’s degrees. Many have gone back to college, and soon, half our directors/managers will have master’s degrees. Likewise, many of the technicians have gone back to get bachelor’s degrees, because they want to improve these soft skills. I wouldn’t directly correlate the two, but it’s worth noting that all of my HTM departments have gone from being packed into the darkest part of the basement at every hospital to all having large, professional-looking departments.

Horace Hunter: Biomed is an ever-changing field and new skills and improvements are always demanded. Biomeds need to get more involved with C-Suite, biomed societies, computer and network technology and more. Biomed needs to develop a close relationship with IT health professionals to work together.


Rus Magoon: I think that IT skills surrounding networking are the key to moving forward. At some point I see clinical engineering being part of IT in more and more hospitals. There’s always going to be some relationship because there’s a lot that IT can learn from clinical engineering as far as responsiveness, urgency of calls — I think the model tends to be, “we received this we’ll get to this,” whereas IT normally has a request protocol and the response isn’t as fast. I think that clinical engineering can learn from IT as well — on the technology side of things, there’s a lot to learn. Some of the IT people are absolutely brilliant when it comes to software and hardware issue and there’s a lot that we can learn from them. Some type of cross-training in servicing would be would be really beneficial.

May 2014 Magazine

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