In the July issue of 24x7 we covered the expansion of departments moving into the fairly uncharted terriroty of home care.

Despite dealing with less than desirable home conditions—including devices infested with cockroaches—the team at San Diego-based Rady Children’s Hospital found that taking this on made financial sense and would improve patient care.

Here’s what Chris Abe, RN, BSN, CIC, HEM, senior director of safety and support services at Rady said: “By bringing the equipment in and maintaining it correctly, we have saved the hospital a lot of money. This has all driven down our overhead costs, and rental costs have gone down. Savings are close to $200,000 a year, and that is factoring in even the salaries associated with performing the maintenance.”
 
Have you ventured into this area? If so, what tips do you have for a smooth transition? Is your department thinking about it? We hope you’ll blog about it with your colleagues by commenting on this.

Often times when we avert some sort of disaster we say, “That was lucky.” Have you ever done that? Rick Schrenker, a systems engineering manager in the department of biomedical engineering at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, authored 24x7’s July "Networking" column and asserts that planning—rather than luck—is the key to smooth operation.

Discussing a specific incident related to him by a biomed he says: “I don’t think the respondent gave his organization enough credit, because it was not luck but good practice that provided for the contingency plans that enabled the continuance of patient care through an outage. But note how a system can be brought to its knees by the failure of a component that might have been considered outside the boundaries of the system during analysis and design, in this case the AC power. Ironically, a breaker trip during maintenance here in Boston brought our entire subway system down the week before I wrote this.”

Does your team have a plan? How about a backup plan? How did you develop it and put it in place? We hope you’ll comment on this blog and share your best practices.

In the June issue of 24x7, J. Scot Mackeil, CBET, wrote a Soapbox about the new challenges and dangers presented with the increased use of wireless multimedia devices.

Scot says: “Caregivers have a need to be tuned in, turned on, and connected in ways we are only beginning to imagine. This new generation of devices can … receive medical alarm notifications and other potentially life-critical information. The most fortunate amongst us process work orders and close PMs in real time using these wireless wonders. But for every upside there is a downside. For example, should anesthesiologists or nurse anesthetists and other key members of a surgical team be accessing their wireless multimedia devices such as cell phones, iPhones, and BlackBerries while they are supposed to be engaged in keeping a patient alive on the table? How about a monitor tech in a central monitoring war room?”

I hope you’ll take a few minutes to read Scot’s compelling Soapbox article and then comment on this blog. Have you faced this? How does your facility handle it? Let us know.