AAMI Update: Free Downloads for HTM Professionals

Anthology of Complex Technology Solutions

The AAMI Foundation has released the last in a series of free anthologies with solutions to seemingly intractable problems with healthcare technologies.

Complex Technology Solutions offers guidance, best practices and practical tools for health care systems and hospitals and for industry – all developed by the AAMI Foundation National Coalition to Promote Safe Use of Complex Healthcare Technology.

“New and complex healthcare technologies require close collaboration of administrative, clinical, human factors, risk and industry personnel for safe integration into the health care environment,” said Tandi M. Bagian, chief engineer at the National Center for Patient Safety at the U.S. Department of Patient Safety and a National Coalition team leader. “This coalition report, developed with a broad range of experts, provides guidance to facilitate such collaborative efforts.”

The anthology features focus sections with actionable resources to help the health care and industry communities more effectively manage complex technologies and collaborate to keep patients safe:

Focus on Health Care Systems and Hospitals

• Developing a business case for effective acquisition
• Guidance and templates for proper integration of new medical technology
• Using risk profiles to plan training and introduce complex technology
• Competence assessment for use of complex technology

Focus on Industry

• Human factors activities and associated standards
• A capability maturity model to integrate human factors activities: guidance for product developers
• Learning from device use issues

“Establishing the practices recommended here will help make medical equipment easier to learn and easier to use,” said Peter Doyle, senior human factors engineer and national coalition team leader. “More importantly, it will help to reduce the occurrence of failure modes that accompany the use of complex healthcare technology.”

The National Coalition to Promote Safe Use of Complex Healthcare Technology, which launched in 2017, responded to overarching challenges that emerged in three other AAMI Foundation National Coalitions on infusion therapy safety, alarm management safety and opioid safety through continuous electronic monitoring.

“All four anthologies of the national coalitions are freely and publicly available to ensure open access to this important information,” said Steve Campbell, AAMI Foundation executive director and acting president and CEO of AAMI. “We encourage you to share and use this valuable content with your colleagues in your organization.”

All four anthologies include links to patient safety seminar presentations, peer-reviewed journal articles, case studies and podcast episodes.

Emergency Preparedness Resource for HTM Departments

The COVID-19 health crisis is hardly the first major emergency to beset healthcare technology management (HTM) departments. And it certainly won’t be the last.

That’s why AAMI’s Technology Management Council (TMC) developed a new tool for assessing how prepared an HTM department is in the event of an emergency. Importantly, Emergency Preparedness Assessment for HTM Departments is free for all AAMI members!

“This emergency preparedness assessment tool was designed to guide HTM professionals toward rapid and appropriate responses during an emergency,” the authors explain. The guide includes:

• Emergency Preparedness Assessment for HTM Departments. A checklist to aid HTM departments in ensuring consistency and completeness when preparing for emergency situations.
• Sample emergency travel authorization letter
• HTM Department Service Continuity Plan. A scaled, prioritized list of work activities based on expected staffing variations during an emergency.
• Guideline for Scheduled Maintenance Compliance during a Health Emergency. A written plan that provides clarification of revised definitions for timely completion of scheduled inspections during an emergency situation when they cannot be completed as normally planned.

According to TMC member Mike Busdicker, system director of clinical engineering at Intermountain Healthcare, the inspiration to develop this document spun out of a unanimous, small-scale survey of HTM departments conducted by the TMC.

A majority of the respondents were not sure if there was an emergency management plan in place for their health system, while “some of the survey respondent even went as far as to say they didn’t even know who their emergency management team was,” he explained.  “That was really concerning.”

“When you’re looking at all HTM departments, regardless of budget or the size of their health system, you’re really going to get a gamut of preparedness levels,” added Danielle McGeary, vice president of HTM at AAMI

“During the worst of the pandemic, I remember one technician called AAMI with an important question and I told him ‘Well I think that would be a great question for your emergency manager’ and he asked, ‘What is an emergency manager?’” McGeary said. “It was a startling reminder that we have to provide these documents for all kinds of departments and levels of preparedness.”

Busdicker joined McGeary and four other co-authors hailing from health systems and HTM service providers in sharing best practices and professional insights when creating the document.

“We wanted to make a document that is so extensive that it can apply to your health care system no matter the size,” he said. “Now anyone can make sure HTM is part of incident command. They look at performance improvement and quality and how they can best improve well before the next emergency.”

AAMI members can download Emergency Preparedness Assessment for HTM Departments for free in the AAMI store. It is also available for purchase by nonmembers.