Throughout this year’s Conference & Expo, AAMI 2016 speakers were forceful and eloquent. Here are some of the standout comments.
“Discovery is an expensive and sloppy process.” —Scott Berkun, author of The Myths of Innovation, on embracing a true culture of innovation in healthcare settings.
“There’s a reason aviation is safe, because we have redundancy built in. We have almost no redundancy built into our healthcare system.” —Frank Overydk, MSEE, MD, Roper St. Francis Health System, on the need for continuous patient monitoring in low-acuity settings.
“I don’t think [the FDA is] going to do nothing. But this is so complex, it’s going to take them a long time to figure out if they’re going to do something, and what that will be.” —Mary Logan, AAMI president and CEO, on the FDA’s next move following the agency’s request for comments on third-party repair of medical devices.
“We’re late to the RCM party, but we’re trying to get into motion.” —Malcolm Ridgway, PhD, on why biomeds need to adopt reliability-centered maintenance.
“Don’t overlook your military. If you have a local military base, you should tap into those resources.” —Ken Mitchell, director of engineering and biomed at Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems, on creative recruitment techniques for HTM personnel.
“We’re #4 on the list of root cause for 70,000 deaths per year…[Hand hygiene] is the simplest single thing we can do to start reducing these numbers in a radical way.” —George Mills, director of The Joint Commission, on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ finding that “physical environment” is the fourth biggest contributor to healthcare-acquired infections.
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Re George: It is really sad that lack of hand hygiene remains the number one threat to our health in the hospital. This remains on my is-there-no-hope-for us list. The list used to include refusal to write clearly, but maybe electronics have dealt with that one. There is also inability to consistently do the right operation on the right patient. But I haven’t seen such news recently. This may be related to my theory that we can collectively only worry about three things at a time.
Obviously an exciting time in history to be in this field based upon all the quotes.