Customers vote with their feet when they stop using a product or a company’s services. By doing this, they send a strong message that they are unhappy. Hospital department heads sometimes vote with their feet when they refuse to use our biomedical engineering services. When they do this, they may be sending us a strong signal that we need to change. We need to spend more time listening to them and focusing on their needs.
Author: Frank Magnarelli
We are fortunate in the United States to have a large number of well-trained and highly dedicated BMETs who love what they do and enjoy being challenged every day. Despite the presence of so many highly qualified dedicated BMETs, there are many hospitals where senior executives are dissatisfied with their biomedical engineering programs.
Starting in the early 1980s, I began using and reviewing various types of medical equipment management software and have found that most of the designs lacked the kinds of features that I thought were useful to me as a manager of “in house” biomedical programs. Although all of the software was better than the paperwork and file based systems we used in the 1970s, none of the products seemed to focus specifically on our needs.
It is that time of year again when we decide what we will do to improve our lives and the lives of others. As people who manage biomedical programs, whether we hold the title of supervisor, director, or manager, we have a responsibility to our staff, our department, and ourselves to make every effort to be the best we can be at our job.
Effective BMETs make an effort to learn as much as possible about hospital operations. This makes them more effective and better able to integrate their work with the other hospital departments. Along with developing an understanding of the clinical applications of medical devices, it is also helpful to learn more about some of the departments that you rely on for support.
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