AAMI Attendance Integra Systems

Integra Systems, Inc. will be attending the annual www.aami.org conference in San Antonio, Texas this coming week (starting on Friday). Just like HIMSS attending for many years, I have been attending this conference since 1985 (yes that long). I have also spoken at many of their regional conferences as well written on the subject of “wireless” for their many publications. This will be an exciting conference as the world of IT and Clinical Engineering are crossing as they say the chasm; and are creating new opportunities. The whole issue of IEC 80001 will be front and center as well as “medical device connectivity”. Definitely the clinical engineer of 2011 can be the change agent to effect how medical device connectivity will cross over into the world of the IT enterprise network. I also see where it perhaps makes sense to combine more now the clinical engineering organization with the IT organization to create a new department of “Healthcare Technology Management”. With the huge acceleration of “networked connectivity” both from hardwired and wireless” medical devices, it seems that this makes perfect logical sense. The biomedical engineer from the experienced deployment of “VHF/UHF/WMTS” can give some technical guidance to the IT organization on “wireless”. Many have had to run a spectrum analyzer to troubleshoot telemetry systems. This is important as IT organizations may have some basic understanding of the WLAN model; but are coming under pressure to sort out like ” should we combine WMTS with a DAS, or should WLAN medical devices be on a DAS, what makes sense, or what WLAN or DAS provides the best CAPEX and OPEX? I only call this out as I have over the year of 2010 be called many times to provide input into this. Mention all done pro bono. There is (what I consider) a still “huge” lack of knowledge out their in the universe on the subject of “wireless” from the standard healthcare IT organization. This kinda of stuff just has not been their DNA. If these departments (IT and Clinical Engineering) could perhaps communicate more effectively: technology decisions from an investment and deployment could be made in a collabrative fashion, not unlike some of the silo decision making that may have existed in the past. This is all positive and will help healthcare organizations provide better care and make the right technology decisions. Healthcare organizations need to really dig deep to do their homework on this “wireless convergence”, versus simply listening to vendor and marketing hype.

www.aami.org