By Steven J. Yelton, P.E., AAMIF
When I entered the “HTM World” then called clinical engineering, it was common to have a mentor to provide you with leadership and specialized training. Traditionally, at that time as is equally true now, there were not many clinical engineering educational programs. I had an associate degree in electronics technology and worked on laboratory equipment at the Ohio State University as I completed my electrical engineering degree.
I then went to work teaching electronics at the college level. Since I had background in laboratory equipment, I was asked to move to the faculty of the biomedical equipment technology program at Cincinnati State College. Gregory L. Herr, C.C.E., became my mentor. He was then and is currently the director of HTM at The Christ Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Greg and I have worked together in many different roles for 30-plus years. We were recently discussing a blog post that he submitted in 2017. This blog discussed what he thought were challenges for those of us working in the HTM field and what we need to do to continue to advance our field.
This was a time when the term “healthcare technology management (HTM)” was starting to take off and we were re-examining our roles. Let me post some excerpts from the blog and look at was happening then and now. I find this post to be very informative and felt it was worth sharing again.
I would like to share the following from the 2017 blog: “As the term ‘healthcare technology management (HTM)’ becomes more prevalent, those of us who work in this field are still challenged with what this name really means. How does one implement the goals of HTM? What are the new opportunities? Embracing HTM as a name should be the first step in a broader goal of bringing greater recognition, respect, and value to the work we do. If it’s just a name change – without an examination of our role – we have missed an opportunity.
Healthcare leadership wants to know what meaningful work HTM does and how that work imparts measurable value. What would happen if HTM did not exist? Or sold as a service to the lowest bidder? What can we do to stay relevant, to be viewed as valued HTM service – and not identified solely as a necessary evil? Healthcare leaders value quality, cost effectiveness, safety and patient satisfaction. So how does HTM align strongly with those values? What will it take for HTM to thrive?
The HTM professional must expand thinking beyond past practices and norms. Benchmarks, such as the number of devices maintained to the number of FTEs or the cost-of-service ratio (COSR), are rough gauges, but they don’t show quality or value. What about downtime or IT security costs? Is there effective technology planning? How are these costs incorporated? Or do we let other departments assume these functions? If we do, HTM will lose its role in the future.
The factors of quality, customer and patient satisfaction, overall value (a measurement of customer satisfaction over total costs) are important, but how does HTM align with these factors? How COSR measure quality or overall value? A low COSR implies efficient operations, but it says nothing about quality. It does not measure cost effectiveness since revenue or usage are not accounted. HTM must include specific quality and value factors in its benchmarking.
The very nature of healthcare technology management is changing. There is a growing information technology (IT) component to much of what we do. In some healthcare facilities, there is an emerging clinical engineering (CE)-IT hybrid position to manage the medical IT systems. Such a position involves taking clinical engineering professionals and training them in basic technical support, applications, and IT fundamentals. Such a professional must be able to interact directly and interact across departments as a peer and with a clear understanding of the workflow. A clear and efficient workflow is important to any organization, and HTM professionals must be involved in setting and understanding the workflow.
The question of how to move HTM into the future hinges on several factors, including each organization’s goals, our own skills in developing and demonstrating our value, and of course the professional relationships we have with leadership and department colleagues. For HTM to thrive, we must think more about our changing role in healthcare and our alignment with the critical success factors the organization has defined.”
I would like to thank Greg for sharing this with us. I find that his vision was very insightful then and still holds true today. He and I discussed areas that seem to be surfacing now and could be added to his vision. The one area that seems to us to be gaining a lot of traction is artificial intelligence (AI). It will be interesting to continue our look back at how HTM was and is.
