By Steven J. Yelton, P.E., AAMIF
I had the privilege of attending the AAMI eXchange this year, in Phoenix. Every year I return from the eXchange with a renewed excitement about the HTM field. It is like a reunion to get to see so many colleagues year after year. The eXchange provides a great forum for reconnecting with old friends and connecting with new ones. It provides us with a time to run ideas past people who are likely pondering ideas like our own.
As always, we are looking at how we can best educate our students. I always return from the eXchange with great ideas. One topic that I seem to run by my AAMI “family” is how to attract more people into our field and further, innovative ideas to help provide our local employers with enough co-operative education (co-op) students and graduates. We currently, and almost always, have more demand for co-op students than we have supply. This is generally true for graduates also.
We have always been a co-op school where our students are required to complete cooperative education assignments to graduate. As such, we have co-op coordinators for each program. They recruit and place students, search for positions, but teach classes on interviewing skills, resume writing, job responsibilities and communications. In conjunction with our other faculty, industry advisors and employers, our co-op coordinators also provide advising to students to make sure early on that they are in the field that best fits them. Our faculty work closely to provide a well-rounded education for our students. Even with all of this, we are challenged to attract enough students into our field.
I mentioned in my last column that many of our hospital-based employers are supporting home healthcare within their HTM departments and have been doing so for many years. As such, our co-op students who can work in these areas are receiving experience in areas previously not possible. Our students are getting experience in Internet connectivity within the home as well as connection speeds and stability of the connection. Our co-op students are working alongside technicians who go into the patient’s residence to assure that the medical equipment placed within the home is working and communicating properly. The technicians have learned many skills “on the job” that were previously unnecessary. Our graduates with co-op experience are likely hired full time by their co-op employers.
Along with my position as professor emeritus, I also work as a senior consultant for a hospital network in Cincinnati, Ohio. We are challenged to work within our human resources framework to be able to hire non-full time employees. We have hired co-op students for many years and still hire them when available.
We are trying to be innovative and think within our available framework. We are in the process of attaining approval for a new position within the HTM department. This is an equipment technician position that is entry level and does not require a college degree, however it does require the employee to be pursuing their degree. This would be similar to a “parallel co-op arrangement.” The student would work and attend school at the same time. The traditional “alternating co-op arrangement” would have the student spending one semester in school, then the next semester they would work in a related job placement. Traditionally, there are two students who pair to fill the openings. At this time, we are not able to find enough students to fill these traditional alternating positions. The equipment technician position is attractive to the person who needs a full-time position but does not have the qualifications for a full HTM technician position.
We are hoping that our equipment technicians would sit for the Certified Associate in Biomedical Technology (CABT) exam. A CABT is an individual who is new to or planning to enter the HTM field and looking to earn an entry-level certification to kick-start their career. We would like them to pursue full certification as a CBET.
Since we are exploring innovate ways to fill HTM roles, I always like to give a shout out to the apprenticeship program within AAMI. This program has been very successful and has helped fill the need for HTM technicians. The following statement is from the AAMI Array website, “Because of the shortage of qualified healthcare technology management (HTM) professionals in the hiring pool, some hospitals and other employers are training their own biomedical equipment technicians (BMETs) from the ground up with no formalized way to ensure these BMETs are trained consistently or to a minimum standard. This apprenticeship program will bring structure to that process and contribute to a solution for bridging the current skill gap in the field for entry-level employees. The intent is that the availability of a formalized BMET apprenticeship that offers formalized training in a real work environment will attract new professionals to the field.”
