By AAMI
Presentation Proposals Sought for New AAMI Exchange
AAMI has launched its call for proposals for presentations at the first AAMI Exchange, the new name for the reimagined AAMI Annual Conference & Expo. The Exchange will be held June 7-10, 2019 in Cleveland, Ohio.
“The AAMI Exchange is more than a healthcare technology management (HTM) conference,” said Sherrie Schulte, AAMI’s senior director of certification and the annual conference. “To help expand the education program, we have complied a list of suggested topics based on feedback from past attendees. We are looking forward to receiving proposals from industry professionals who might not have thought about presenting at the conference in the past.”
Suggested session topics include:
- Artificial intelligence
- Changes in point of care
- Cybersecurity
- Data analytics
- Home health
- Impact of declining reimbursement
- Internet of Things
- Meeting regulatory/accreditation requirements
- Impact of declining reimbursement
- Sterilization
- Virtual reality
Presenting at the AAMI Exchange can be a great way for professionals to elevate their profiles in the field and showcase their skills and value. Presenters also can earn CEUs.
Proposals may be submitted by individuals or groups working in or serving the health technology field. AAMI membership is not required to submit a proposal or to present at the AAMI Exchange.
For more information, visit www.aami.org/aamiexchange.
AAMI Journal Sheds Light on Challenges, Trends with Pediatric Technology
The field of pediatric healthcare technology faces profound challenges to overcoming a smaller market, a smaller patient and an ever-changing physiological landscape.
Those challenges – and opportunities – are the focus of a recent cover story in BI&T (Biomedical Instrumentation & Technology), AAMI’s award-winning journal.
Developing pediatric medical devices is not a smooth road for many companies; locating funding is onerous because the market, and potential return on investment, for pediatric technology is far smaller than that for devices used by adults or those for general use.
The pediatric market crunch is further obfuscated by a variety of other factors. For example, pediatric illnesses tend to be more variable than adult illnesses, and children are constantly changing (e.g., in terms of physical size and heart rate). The inherent lack of constants in the pediatric population makes developing technology particularly challenging.
Despite these obstacles, those who work in the field are moving into the future guided by the enormous amount of passion, empathy and ingenuity that pediatric patients deserve.
“The challenges are not insurmountable, but there is additional complexity, effort, time and cost,” said Eric Stone, cofounder and CEO of Velano Vascular, one of the experts quoted in the article.
AAMI Foundation Awards Fresh Round of Research Grants
The AAMI Foundation has named the recipients of funding from the Mary K. Logan Research Awards Program for 2018. The two grants, worth a total of $79,950, will go to researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine in Ohio for projects focused on reducing pediatric medication errors.
This awards program, which was named in honor of AAMI’s former president and CEO, was established in 2016 with a gift from the association’s board of directors. It is intended to support research and initiatives that focus on improving patient safety and eliminating morbidity and mortality associated with the use of health technology.
“The AAMI Foundation is extremely proud to support the vital pediatric research being conducted at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine,” said Christine V. Emery, executive director of the AAMI Foundation. “Patient safety is at the heart of our mission, and it is through well-designed scientific studies such as these that we hope to provide enhanced tools and promote systemic changes that will improve the protection of even the most vulnerable patients.”
The AAMI Foundation awarded $39,950 to a Brigham and Women’s Hospital research team, led by Kumiko O. Schnock, RN, PhD, a research associate in the department of medicine. The group will focus on refining an existing data collection tool that has been tested with adults to determine the frequency and type of intravenous (IV) medication administration errors that occur when using smart pumps in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Such errors can have potentially severe consequences.
Another pediatric patient safety challenge is inaccurate body weight data. This issue is significant because of the frequent use of weight-based dosing of medications and errors propagated by electronic health record (EHR) systems.
“In a pediatric environment, where many medication doses are based on weight, a medication error is possible if a wrong weight is entered for a patient. Yet, kids with severe conditions can have unusual growth patterns, so automated identification of weight errors is difficult,” said Danny T.Y. Wu, PhD, assistant professor of biomedical informatics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. “We have developed a computerized medication safety system that can detect weight errors and stop the medication ordering process to prevent errors, but at this point we need to improve the system’s positive predictive value.”
Wu and his research team were awarded $40,000 by the AAMI Foundation to help conduct this additional research.
