Annual Meeting Focuses on Key Issues for Clinical Engineers
The 29th Annual Conference on Clinical Engineering Productivity and Cost Effectiveness, known affectionately by many as the “Manny Meeting,” proved again to be a popular event. Convened May 31 ahead of the opening of the AAMI 2013 Conference & Expo in Long Beach, CA, the meeting attracted a host of attendees, who gathered to discuss such challenges as clinical alarm management, medical device integration, and analytics from computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS).
Clinical alarm management has been the major focus of mainstream media outlets. It also has been a challenge for the clinical engineering (CE) world, particularly since The Joint Commission released a proposed national patient safety goal earlier this year on the topic. As if to prove this point, Jim Keller, vice president of ECRI Institute's Health Technology Evaluation and Safety, noted 957 facilities called in to the May 1 NPSG webinar on alarm safety. In addition ECRI repeatedly has placed alarm safety on its annual Top 10 list of device hazards. Given these realities, healthcare facility chief executive officers have started to take notice.
Keller said the issue of alarms system management provides healthcare technology management (HTM) professionals a key opportunity to demonstrate the vital role they play in patient safety. “This is a subject the clinical engineering community needs to be on top of and kind of in charge of,” he said.
What can HTM professionals do? Speakers said they work with nursing to ensure patient safety and serve as the facility's go-to-group for any alarms-related issue. In particular, HTM professionals can take ownership of the challenge of alarm settings, especially alarm sensitivity and specificity, and help clinicians focus on “actionable” alarms. By that, speakers said, they mean alarms in which a bedside response is required to rescue a patient from harm.
Keller gave a hat tip to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, William Beaumont Hospital, Johns Hopkins, and Boston Medical Center as good models for alarm management.
Another big topic covered was CMMS and how they are helpful for maintaining inspection schedules; tracking equipment inventory, device downtime, and purchase orders; and creating work orders, as detailed by presenter Dave Dickey, corporate director of clinical engineering at McLaren Regional Medical Center in Michigan.
While these systems provide useful data, clinical engineers need to use them in a way that shows the usefulness of their department, Dickey added,. “All of the features of modern CMMS are great and cool,” but CE departments must focus on using them to demonstrate their need for additional resources.
While CMMS products provide a lot of important information, attendees said they want new features to make them more useful, such as having more reporting tools that allow customers to easily access the data they want.
The nickname “Manny Meeting” is a tribute to organizer Manny Furst, a longtime leader in the clinical engineering community.
Posted: 06.01.13