From the May 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
How do you become a state-of-the-art HTM organization in the current environment?
Clinical engineering teams need to be the drivers of change and collaborate more closely with their peers in IT. This requires breaking down long-standing barriers that have existed between these two important organizations. As more workflows and tasks transition to the cloud, this could serve as common ground and allow these two teams to get on the same page in terms of better, smarter and faster HTM. Working together, both organizations can help bring forward creative solutions and application of more modern technology and approaches. At the same time, as partners, clinical engineering and IT can create the needed momentum to get rid of the entire ecosystem of antiquated and time-consuming processes that were put in place to prop-up and triage legacy CMMS technology.
Adopting a mobile-first strategy
The world now operates in a mobile-first environment. Clinical engineers and IT staffers are no longer managing a substantial portion of their HTM tasks at a desktop. Service management workers in a health care system need to be able to do their tasks no matter where they find themselves within the hospital footprint. Task completion must be accomplished, independent of whether Wi-Fi or a network connection is available. Fully transitioning to the cloud and using a cloud-based platform alleviates these challenges and give clinical engineers more data in real time to drive better service management decisions and positively influence patient experience and safety.
A compounding issue for the health care system is availability of new clinical engineering talent. A drought is underway. To compete for resources, the health care system must move to a portfolio of modern, cloud-based, mobile-first technologies. Who wants to work on technology built in the 1990s? Health care systems with advanced HTM programs using modern technology will more effectively recruit, develop and retain quality resources.
Protecting connected medical devices
Connected medical device cyber security is a clear and present danger for health care systems. Moving past legacy CMMS and onto a modern, cloud-based alternative provides essential protection against cyber security threats. Health care systems need to make every effort to mitigate cyber security risk and protect patient safety and data. Embracing the cloud to meet increasingly complex and demanding regulatory, patient care and safety requirements for HTM is necessary.
