by
Lauren Dubinsky, Senior Reporter | May 08, 2017
From the May 2017 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Robert Harry, clinical engineering service site director at Feather River Hospital in Paradise, California, sent his engineers to formal training for network-based devices and systems.
“In the past, our responsibility was to make sure that our medical equipment was sending data to a central monitoring system through a gateway server, and then from then on it wasn’t our responsibility,” he says. “Things are changing now because we are taking over these gateways and our staff is being trained in health care IT so they can maintain and troubleshoot issues with servers.”
Harry has requested a test patient EMR so that his team can perform their own tests to see if vitals and other information from the medical equipment is flowing into the EMR. He says the hospital is currently working on getting one.
His long-term goal is to have his own IT department within the biomedical engineering department, which is something Feather River Hospital has been working toward for the past five years.
“There is a severing of responsibility,” says Harry. “ PACS is controlled completely by the IT department, but I think in the future it will be controlled by health care technology management.”
ISO perspective
“[Device integration] has opened up some new challenges and opportunities around the IT skill sets needed for our engineers,” says Sodexo’s Riehm. “It’s particularly an area where our staff probably doesn’t already have those skill sets, so we are looking at increasing our capacity and capabilities with IT integration.”
Renovo is taking the same approach by encouraging their biomedical engineers to become more cognizant of how IT systems work by being trained in networking and other IT disciplines.
“In the past biomedical departments and IT departments never had a need to speak with each other, but now the two disciplines are coming much more closely together and the lines separating the two are much blurrier, if not completely gone,” says Sandy Morford, CEO of Renovo.
