“If it’s been okayed by the manufacturer then we need someone from the clinical engineering side to stand in front of that piece of equipment to make sure it gets updated properly and functions properly after the update,” he said. “IT is not able to do that just by looking at the network.”

About 10 years ago, SSM Health in St. Louis, Missouri consolidated all of its HTM departments into one department and merged it with the IT department to create SSM Integrated Health Technologies (IHT).


In this structure, the vice president of HTM at the health system, Heidi E. Horn, reports directly to the chief information officer. The HTM department is integrated into IT’s change control, technical risk assessment and HIPAA risk assessment processes, and also shares the same incident management/computerized maintenance management system application platform.

SSM Health also employed a clinical device security analyst who works very closely with IT security.

“He has essentially created the health system’s medical device security programs, because before him we did not have anyone who had the time and skill set to focus on medical device security, which, as we know, has some unique challenges compared to IT security,” said Horn.

The analyst helps HTM respond to electronic protected health information (ePHI) and cybersecurity threats while developing processes to ensure medical devices are safe from cyber attacks.

“People always worry about cyber attacks coming over the network, but one of our previous ‘blind spots’ was ePHI and non-networked lightweight portable devices such as EMG laptops and ultrasounds,” said Horn. “Under [the security analyst’s] project management, we implemented a plan to physically secure all those devices and a process to assess the security needs of all new devices.”

The HTM department at Cedar Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California became part of the IT department, which it refers to as Enterprise Information Services (EIS), in 2012. HTM collaborates with various teams within EIS to work on medical device integration projects.

“The device integration team consisted of staff that had previously been part of EIS, so those processes remained,” said Curt Rodriguez, EIS manager at Cedars Sinai. “However, some new workflows needed to be developed that aligned more with clinical engineering strategic objectives and projects.”

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