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.”