COVID-19 IMPACTS HTM INDUSTRY BY ERIN REGISTER
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OVID-19 has, without a doubt, taken the world by storm and impacted every industry in the country in various ways. The entire hospital system, including doctors, nurses, patients, equipment and more, has been affected tremendously by this disease. How has the healthcare technology management (HTM) industry been affected?
The Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) hosted a COVID-19 Town Hall where HTM leaders, such as Danielle McGeary and Mike Busdicker, discussed what HTM professionals need to know. Additionally, the California Medical Instrumentation Association (CMIA) expanded its chapter meetings and held a virtual COVID-19 response panel discussion with BMETs and other HTM professionals from all over the country. TechNation has continued to discover the best information, advice and practices by interviewing more leaders of the HTM industry and how their departments have 6
DIGITAL SUPPLEMENT | COVID-19
been infected by COVID-19. When asked how COVID-19 has impacted his work, Dallas Sutton, clinical engineering manager at Wade Med, answered, “For us, while there have been some weekends for leadership and, very minimally, for technicians, we have just had a lot of additional initial inspections. We have also reprioritized how we work repairs – vents moved to the top of the list, then monitors and so forth. Our director, clinical engineer and a support technician have been working diligently to identify what rooms can be configured as non-traditional ICUs, which has resulted in additional work in monitor configuration, installation and getting cables pulled. Finally, we have actually gotten to do ‘fun’ stuff, like figuring out the ‘just in case’ capabilities of using a single vent on up to 4 patients and configuring an anesthesia unit to function as a vent. Based on the time invested above, PMs have suffered. We are mainly focusing on high risk and any low risk we can fit in. However, through all of this, we have still been able to support staff vacations,
which is something we credit to the efficiencies we have developed within the current team.” Jennifer DeFrancesco, system director at University of Cincinnati Health System, also told TechNation how her work has been impacted by the virus. “Our team has seen a big transition of our on-demand workload from areas that are closed, have a lower census or areas doing elective procedures to on-demand projects to expand ICU capacity on-site and offsite to support the hospital’s operations and the regional efforts,” said DeFrancesco. “HTM also has the added task of managing the ongoing regulatory requirements during this time, so overall our workload isn’t much decreased. A lot more of our daily work is going into innovations or tactical process improvements to improve delivery of patient treatment, reduce clinician exposure as well as PPE usage through better design of systems.” Sutton and others also noted the challenges they have faced and continue to face during this pandemic. www.1TechNation.com