David Scott, CBET, recently won the 2009 AAMI/GE Healthcare BMET of the Year Award, which he accepted at the AAMI conference—Congratulations Dave! He is a manager at the Children’s Hospital in Aurora, Colo, and he is also the president of the Colorado Association of Biomedical Technicians (CABMET).

This is a very active group that has educational sessions throughout the year, an annual symposium, and a certification study group that it offers via teleconference. CABMET’s other officers include VP Robert Preston, CBET; Secretary Cindy Lusietto; and Treasurer Ken Ottenberg , CBET. What makes this organization tick?

I invite CABMET members and members of all biomed associations to write their comments on the successful practices they’ve employed to keep their organizations growing.

At 24x7 we are always interested in hearing your comments to posted blog topics. We’re also interested in your best practices on topics we haven’t covered, as well as questions on your search for answers to be more efficient. Veteran biomed Victor Sarmiento, had some questions about electrical leakage measurements. Here’s what he said:

“Through the years of sustained improvements in medical instrumentation designs, what do your readers feel, or what are their opinions on continuously conducting a regular electrical leakage measurement, a program normally undertaken by their respective biomed department? Most departments are doing this religiously year-in and year-out, in guise, or to justify that by doing so it ‘enhances patient safety.’ ” He added that as a result departments “allocate enormous amounts of time and manpower towards its implementation.”

Then he asks: “Can any justify the need for it to be done only during the first initial inspection and maybe every five years thereafter or after a major repair was done on the device? Do they really need to be done on a regular basis? Does it really help improve patient safety? What are your thoughts on this topic?”

We’ll all be looking forward to your comments and thanks!

Fred Jaramillo, biomed manager at University of Colorado Hospital, Aurora, Colo, offers a best practice he gained from a session at the AAMI conference. He told me it had to do with Six Sigma. According to Wikipedia, it’s a “business management strategy that seeks to improve the quality of process outputs. Each Six Sigma project carried out within an organization follows a defined sequence of steps and has quantified financial targets (cost reduction or profit increase).”

Fred said it gave him another tool to solve problems. He said: “I can look at something and say, ‘here’s the problem and here are the steps to a solution.’ You can adapt the program and get team input. You can retool or change the program and eventually have a solid process.”

Have you used Six Sigma? Any tips? Did you attend AAMI and pick up other pearls of wisdom? Please e-mail me at jkirst@ascendmedia.com and I’ll post your best practice. Thanks!

At the AAMI show this past weekend in Baltimore, I asked Gregory S. Duncan, CBET, CHSP, chief biomedical engineer & safety officer at Children's Hospital and Research Center in Oakland, Calif, if he had any "best practices" to share with our readers. Here's what he said:

"By reviewing 'No problem found' submissions on repair work orders you can spot trends. Often, you'll find it's not a mechanical problem with the equipment and it can be corrected with customer training. Or, by observing the clinicians' use an educational session can be provided right then."

Have you tracked repair information and found the same thing? What works for you? Be sure to submit your comment and let us know.

 

We’re interested in your best practice when it comes to reporting device incidents—does your department have a procedure that works well? What if you simply order something, from batteries to pumps, that doesn’t perform well, what’s the quickest way to get your replacements? Every now and then I read on the Biomedtalk Listserv that some manufacturers don’t respond well to returns, so we’d love to hear what works.

When it comes time to ask for more help or make other department adjustments, how do you make a case for your requests? Benchmarking can help a department measure essential duties and the amount of time it takes to perform these tasks, and the documented information lends support to requests. In the past it has been difficult for clinical/biomedical engineering departments to measure their performance against other clinical/biomedical engineering department due to the variables involved. Recently, AAMI and ECRI Institute released new or enhanced biomed benchmarking tools to aid departments.

Has your department purchased these tools? If not, what’s your best practice for analyzing how well your department is utilizing its resources? If you’ve created your own system we’d love to know. Your comments are welcome.

In our May issue, one of our features, “Caught in the Middle,” discusses the challenges clinical/biomedical engineering departments often face when working with multiple vendors.

Ken Olbrish, MSBE, enterprise imaging system administrator at Main Line Health System in suburban Philadelphia, says, “Typically, what happens is that information is not successfully passed between the devices, or more likely information is exchanged but it is not formatted as expected or is missing certain pieces of necessary information.”

The upshot is frustrated clinicians who want the system “fixed,” and competing vendors who blame one another. When this occurs, the biomed as diplomat must step in. “Handling these issues is very tricky,” Olbrish says. “The key point is to try to get the vendors to stop the finger pointing and agree to have a constructive discussion.” The common way Olbrish deals with this issue is by sitting the vendors down together and putting them on the spot. He has found that it is harder for vendors to blame one another if they are in the same room together.

How have you dealt with this? Looking forward to your comments on this topic. Thanks!

BMETs and CEs have enough to keep up with these days, but it seems the IT issue keeps coming up in various discussions. I received an e-mail from Paul McNamara of St Mary’s Hospital in Green Bay, Wis, who wrote about his frustration with the resistance to the whole topic that he sees in other members of the profession. What he said made sense to me and it sounded like he was taking smart steps to secure his future.

One thing he said was, “My point is just that a lot of biomeds seem to be afraid of a merger with the IT departments and think they know it will be a bad thing. I think if more biomeds opened up to the fact that it will be happening whether they like it or not, there are many opportunities for all. I have found that there is one of the best possible advantages of the integration—job security. The smart biomeds are taking on this merger as the best possibility to either advance their careers into management, or at the very least, have much higher job security. Think about it. If a biomed is asked to network two devices, it can easily be done. Ask an IT analyst to fix a ventilator and you see the look of a deer in headlights. You see, the transition is easy.”

What do you think? We look forward to your comments.

 

I received an inquiry from Dan Dudley, director, medical engineering, Wishard Health Services, Indianapolis, who was looking for some specific information but all he could find was information from the manufacturer. Hopefully someone out there will have an answer to Dan’s question, but what we’d also like to know is where you go to find that hard-to-obtain information you seek. We hope you’ll share your best practices with us, and here’s Dan’s question:

“Is there any study that has been conducted to determine an industry leader in defibrillators that are most effective for bariatric patients? The root question is 200j biphasic vs 360j biphasic. I am hoping to shore up my understanding of the waveform effect and how that relates to body size—hopefully from an independent party. Thanks.”

I’ve had a few e-mails lately from biomeds concerned with possible layoffs and outsourcing. What can you do? I received an e-mail in response to our March feature, “Design Your Day,” about starting your own ISO. While this article was not about outsourcing but about stepping out on your own, our reader did respond to it based on his experience with ISOs. As you read his comments, please keep in mind this is not meant to cast aspersions on ISOs, but he has shared his frustration and some thoughts, which I hope will stimulate dialogue among you that will yield some “best practices” on how to cope with the possibility of outsourcing. Also, have a look at our April feature, “Managing the Budget Crunch,” that also has some tips on this topic.

The e-mail I received says, “The e-mail I sent you reflects my frustration with this business model from the perspective of a hospital biomedical engineer when decisions of this nature are made by the administration. This is a very technical field and requires working with equipment that is unique to my hospital on a day-to-day basis to provide optimum support. Unless the third-party organization has a lot of integrity and views their position as an advocate of the hospital, it is not a good investment for the hospital. Please feel free to use my comments as it may save some organization from a painful learning experience about the nature of these contracts, or at least motivate them to examine what it is they are receiving for their money.”

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