Training to Succeed: A Free-Market Solution to Self-Reliance

Training has become a potpourri of opportunities with technology playing a big role in its evolution. The Internet has been a game-changer with the convenience and cost savings of online resources making training resources as close as your favorite easy chair.

For the HTM professional, the variety and variations of training resources is expansive and comes in many stripes. From OEM and third-party offerings, in-house to fortuitous share-the-knowledge opportunities, conference training to the aforementioned online opportunities, the choices are numerous.

The factors that seem to drive the decision process are often budget, convenience, depth, and the availability of things like manuals, a keypass or passwords. There are as many opinions about what source of training is best as there are resources for training.

Different approaches to training are favored for different types of equipment and the cost of the different forms of training begs the question; where do you get the most bang for your buck?

HTM Perspective

The choice of which route to take for any given HTM department is a judicious one that considers cost, practicality and availability. There tends to be some consistency in the reasoning and rationale for choosing one source or another among HTM leadership. Variables are often the experience of a department’s technicians and engineers, budgetary concerns, negotiated contracts and the modalities for which training is required.

“The option of OEM training versus ISO training is dependent on the equipment and the experience of the engineer going to training and budget constraints for implementing the training. For equipment, where service keys or software is required and only provided to OEM-trained engineers, it is best to seek that training from the OEM and work to reduce your training costs,” says Rob Bundick, manager of HTM and biomedical engineering at ProHealth Care in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

“OEM training is typically more expensive, but the costs can be reduced by partnering with them at the time of purchase, or by developing service options that allow for training at a discount,” Bundick adds.

The OEM route may be the only option for newer systems, says Rick Walston, regional director of clinical engineering services at Adventist Health in St. Helena, California.

“For systems that have been on the market for a while, the third-party companies in this industry have done a pretty good job teaching a tech pretty much everything they need to know,” he says.

“We use both the manufacturer and ISOs for training. It depends on the modality that you need training on. Manufacturers tend to have good training on their products, where ISOs might cover multiple manufacturers during training. We also cross train our own technicians from those who attended training,” says Douglas Dreps, MBA, director of eastern regional operations-clinical engineering services for Mercy Health in St. Louis, Missouri.

“Sometimes the OEM training goes just far enough to allow a service technician the ability to perform standard PM/calibrations, but not deep enough to troubleshoot the more difficult problems,” says Mike Busdicker, MBA, CHTM, system director of clinical engineering for Intermountain Healthcare.

“Some of my past experience has shown me that some ISO training gets more in-depth, and hands-on, with specific types of equipment. With that being said, I do believe there is a need to regulate, control, and certify training organizations,” Busdicker says. “The objective would be to ensure service personnel are getting the appropriate level of training to ensure equipment function along with patient and staff safety.”

He adds that when it comes to the higher end equipment like CT, MR, and lab analyzers, he believes that there is a need for specialized training.

Christopher Nowak, CBET, CHP, CSCS, corporate senior director of healthcare technology management at Universal Health Services of Delaware Inc. in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, says that his department uses a combination of OEM and third-party education.

“The decision on how to educate, OEM or third-party, is dependent on the product/modality and the available education. We tend to use third-party education more frequently for imaging technologies due to the availability of the education and the reputation of the education providers,” Nowak says

“Even the OEMs use the third-parties for imaging technology education for the OEM staff multi-vendor service. For modalities such as anesthesia, patient monitoring, and laboratory devices, we tend to use OEM education. The availability of these modality-type education schools drives this decision process. I really do not see a quality problem using either educational pathway and each delivers the value that we are looking for to develop the skill-sets of the team.”

Parsing the training/equipment paradigm further reveals that there are some preferences in choosing one mode of training over another.

“The OEM education seems to work well for us for technologies such as patient monitoring, anesthesia systems, laboratory equipment, nurse call and other type systems. Third-party education seems to work well for the imaging systems that we support,” Nowak says.

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