AAMI Annual Conference Focuses Spotlight on Healthcare Technology

Drawing hundreds of healthcare technology management professionals, AAMI’s 2012 Conference & Expo shed light on important patient safety issues and showcased some of the latest innovations in the medical device world.

The three-day conference in Charlotte, NC, wrapped up June 4, after dozens of presentations and roundtables on subjects as diverse as wireless strategies for hospitals, alarms management, nuclear medicine, leadership development, workday challenges for clinical engineers and biomeds, and systems engineering principles in healthcare. Roughly 1,500 attended the conference.

Nearly 200 medical technology vendors also showed off their latest products in the Expo Hall, including several wireless patient monitoring devices; pointing technologies that allowed for cursor control without physical contact (a potentially important feature when cross contamination is a concern); real time data location systems; and equipment management software.

Physician and inventor Daniel Kraft detailed emerging technologies during his keynote speech.

“The devices themselves are getting more powerful, smaller, and portable. I can use my phone’s camera to look at skin, and I can do a referral through the mobile phone,” said Kraft, CEO of IntelliMedicine, executive director of FutureMed, and medical track chair at Singularity University.

It isn’t just the technology that is changing, speakers say; it is also how healthcare is administered.

Robert Jesse, MD, principal deputy under secretary for health with the U.S. Veterans Health Administration, spoke about the need to implement systems engineering into healthcare. Jesse said that systems engineering principles used by other industries to improve efficiency and quality haven’t been applied to healthcare.

“We spend all our time saying medicine is different and those rules don’t apply to us,” he said. “For the art of medicine to flourish, the science of systems has to operate flawlessly.”

Avinash Konkani, who won a $2,500 scholarship from the AAMI Foundation’s Michael J. Miller Scholarship Program, attended the conference for the first time and came away inspired.

“I am very impressed by the way it is organized,” said Konkani, who is pursuing his PhD in systems engineering at Oakland University in Rochester, MI. “All the sessions were on current topics of importance to the biomed and clinical engineering community.”

“I’m looking forward to coming again next year,” he said

AAMI, the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation, is a nonprofit organization founded in 1967. It is a diverse community of nearly 7,000 healthcare technology professionals united by one important mission—supporting the healthcare community in the development, management, and use of safe and effective medical technology.