Got to Chicago Friday and had the opportunity to attend the www.draeger.com sponsored session, “ Navigating the Shared Clinical Engineering and IT Work-Space” It was also co-sponsored by ACCE, AAMI, IEEE, EMB , IHE and the BioTech Council Today clinical engineers are being charged with extending their scope as communications, problem solvers, and experts in integrating high technology systems. With increasing frequency they rely on and interact with their IT counterparts. The Clinical Engineering and IT Leadership Symposium was a full-day program designed to foster the collaboration between clinical engineers and IT professionals. As I have seen the transformation over the years of www.aami.org and www.himss.org, and was great to see the cross mix of leading CIO(s) and clinical engineering folks. Some IDNs that I know actually do not have an IT department or Clinical Engineering Department. Rather they have chosen to merge both organizations into a “Technology Management Department.” Close to over 90 people were in attendance. Dr. Glaser started the conference with a great discussion titled “ The Perfect Storm: Clinical Engineering and Information Technology Convergence”. This was followed by many other sessions to include E-Merging Technologies” The Benefits of Integrating IT and CE (Clinical Engineering), Security Issues Affecting Medical Devices on the HCIT Infrastructure, and finally the best the Best Practices Eastern Main Medical Center, showing the integration between CE-IT integration and the road to EHR interoperability. During this session, I also had the opportunity to spend some quality time with www.draeger.com and see how the M300 is pretty much transforming the traditional patient worn monitoring or traditional telemetry landscape. What I found quite interesting over lunch was the comment by a CIO that she heard that telemetry could not be run over a shared infrastructure. This as I explained, simply is not true. The medical device companies test through the “validation and verification” process (FDA 510K submittal) the efficacy of the “network”, whether proprietary or shared. In all actuality the use of standards based networking will allow for better risk mitigation and performance, using traditional network design and monitoring tools. As John Chambers CEO of www.cisco.com, stated at the 2004 HIMSS conference where I attended, the days of “proprietary networks” are over. These type of unsolicited comments, only confirm to me that the Draeger OneNet strategy is definitely challenging the competitive proprietary patient monitoring network model. The in-house wireless model for healthcare is following other vertical markets. Rather than having “limited areas” of wireless patient monitoring or telemetry monitoring, it will be desired to have this “house wide”, in other words “antenna coverage throughout”. This gives the hospital the ability to “flex the facility”. This keeps the potential of divergence low and provides true “enterprise patient monitoring:. Finally at the close of this day Saturday, spent some great quality time with Brian McAlpine of www.capsuletech.com. After all of these years our collaboration and hard work has paid off by the unveiling of the Neuron platform. It is the cornerstone of the foundation for solving the “association and dissassocaiton” at the point of care, as well as the validation of the connectivity of the HL7 messaging direct to any EMR model. Watch this company closely as they are the Switzerland of medical device connectivity, while moving forward to apply true supply chain validation of the medical device, the patient, and the clinician. All of this has taken the approach to not throw more technology on the clinician, but actually provide process in the background to automate thereby letting the clinician focus on the improvement of patient care. When this association of the medical device, clinician, and patient occurs, you then can build all kinds of algorithms for automated charge capture, alarm notification, etc.
