AAMI/FDA Interoperability Summit Kicks Off
With the mantra of “getting patient safety right,” a diverse group of healthcare, manufacturing, and information technology experts kicked off a two-day summit aimed at identifying the top interoperability challenges and finding solutions.
The Oct. 2-3 summit, hosted by AAMI and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, is focusing attention on an issue that hospitals and other healthcare facilities have been wrestling with for years—how to best connect medical devices to one another and the IT network, and fold in the use of electronic medical records.
“You’re here because you live and breathe patient safety—or you’re at least curious about it,” AAMI President Mary Logan told the more than 200 attendees at the start of the summit, which is taking place at a hotel in Herndon, VA, outside of Washington, DC. She urged them to use the two days to share ideas and questions, challenge one another, and look for ways to move the goal of interoperability forward.
Key to that effort, according to Scott Colburn, director of the standards program for the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH), is coming up with a mutual understanding of how to define interoperability and recognize its success.
“We need to make sure we’re talking the same language,” Colburn said.
The AAMI/FDA Interoperability Summit began with a keynote address by David Classen, MD, the chief medical information officer at Pascal Matrics and an associate professor of medicine at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Classen was also a member of an Institute of Medicine committee that drafted a report, Health IT and Patient Safety: Building Safer Systems for Better Care.
Classen compared the goal of achieving interoperability to “a long car ride.” To the question of “are we there yet,” the answer is no. Twelve years after a another IOM report, the landmark To Err Is Human, which estimated up to 98,000 people each year die because of preventable medical errors, Classen said subsequent studies suggest that the number is far higher, and failures in interoperability are partly to blame.
Complicating the picture, Classen said, is the fact that the reporting of such medical errors is spotty, so there’s no understanding of how prevalent some interoperability problems might be.
“The bottom line: There’s a huge problem in safety and our measurement system is really, really inadequate,” he said.
Speakers scheduled to address the summit include federal regulators, manufacturers, clinicians, and clinical engineers. Case studies, best practices, research gaps, the experiences of other industries, and systems engineering principles are among the areas of focus at the summit.
This is the fourth summit where AAMI and FDA have joined forces to shed light on a significant challenge in healthcare technology.
Posted: October 2, 2012