AAMI Holds Nuclear Power Collaboration Workshop
Who would imagine that healthcare and nuclear power have anything in common? A group of 50 experts from both industries met at a workshop to learn about the differences and similarities between the two fields. AAMI President Mary Logan provides an account of the insightful workshop held by AAMI and the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) July 19-20 in San Diego, CA.
The workshop focused on risk and human factors, with the overall goal of promoting shared knowledge to improve reliability in both sectors. Small groups explored four topics: software reliability, diagnostics and prognostics, human factors, and adverse event reporting and analysis.
The attendees were a mix of industry and academic experts, consultants, and regulators from both fields. It was a rare honor to be in the midst of these renowned leaders.
The two days of incredibly rich discussion will be turned into a monograph that will be made widely available by AAMI and INL.
The goal is to produce a working document that is more practical than some academic exercises. The document will educate experts in both fields, and create the opportunity for future potential collaborations (e.g., research, workshops, white papers, etc.).
In addition, Matthew Weinger, AAMI board member, and Carol Herman, AAMI senior vice president of standards, discussed and synthesized the workshop’s lessons along with David Desaulniers from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Emilie Roth from Roth Engineering, and Ken Thomas from INL, at the American Nuclear Society’s annual conference on July 23. AAMI intends to host a similar session at a future AAMI event.
One of the healthcare facilitators summed up a prime difference in perceptions of a power facility versus a hospital: A nuclear power plant is perceived as being quite a risky venture although in reality it is quite safe; whereas the opposite is true for a healthcare organization.
Here are some highlights from each working group:
- Software Dependability: In both domains, use-case scenarios are not well defined, and there is no adequate process for analysis. The current focus of software dependability is too narrow. The nuclear power field is ahead of healthcare in studying the need for redundancy within some high-risk devices and processes.
- Diagnostics and Prognostics: Healthcare needs more context-sensitive interpretations and alerts, something that the nuclear power industry has mastered well. One of the hallmarks of nuclear power safety is its team-centric responsibility management and true culture of safety.
- Human Factors and Reliability: Both fields should use a stronger socio-technical approach to solving problems. Healthcare most urgently needs to address information overload with real-time data reduction for emergent problems.
- Root Cause and Event Analysis: Healthcare needs more effective methods of event detection and event analysis, and identification of critical failure modes. Both domains need more optimal methods of implementing corrective actions to reduce the incidence and severity of future failures. A unique aspect of healthcare that hampers the ability to learn from events is the pervasive culture of silence. This includes not sharing adverse events with other organizations, and a rush to find a single root cause, such as blaming the clinician or technology.
A common thread in all group sessions was the recognition that healthcare and nuclear power are both socio-technical systems, and that risk and reliability will improve only when quality and safety measures are viewed from this perspective.
Posted: July 25, 2012