By K. Richard Douglas
Headquartered in Macon, Georgia, Atrium Health Navicent is a leading health care provider in central and south Georgia. The nonprofit health system was incorporated in 1994.
The Atrium Health Clinical Engineering Department is made up of a cohesive 13-member team.
The department includes Bobby Benjamin, Mica Buice, David Couch, Jacob Cruz, Ca’Ron Gordon, Chrystal Hinton, Eric Kemp, Jeannine Kieweg, Angelia King, Virgle Stroud, Russell Miller, Herman Yang, Supervisor Brad Litke and Manager Skip Nieland.
“We have a really good group of techs. We get along really well and work well together. We have a vast variety of backgrounds, but they all blend together to make a great team,” Litke says.
He says that the clinical engineering (CE) team services more than 50 Atrium Health Navicent facilities, including Atrium Health Navicent The Medical Center, central and south Georgia’s only Level I Trauma Center, multiple hospitals, diagnostic centers, urgent care practices, medical offices, skilled nursing facilities and a senior life-plan community.
“Each technician is assigned an area of the health system in which they specialize. That means, they’ve gone to school and been trained on specific equipment and have worked on it for several years. For example, Chrystal Hinton is a respiratory specialist and primarily works on ventilators. Ca’Ron Gordon works in the cardiac department and cath labs. Angelia King stays scrubbed-out and works on OR equipment. Eric Kemp maintains dialysis equipment in-house, which is a rare thing, because most health systems have to contract that service,” Litke says.
Having a specialist on staff has helped with network integration, along with support from IT.
“We are heavily integrated, thanks in great part to our integration systems analyst Russell Miller and our IT counterparts. About 3,200 pieces are connected to our EMR or PACS imaging system, including all bedside monitors, telemetry, anesthesia, perfusion, dialysis, ventilators, lab analyzers, imaging equipment and ECGs,” Litke says.
With several in-house specialists, most of the equipment is serviced by the team, but there are exceptions.
“Service contracts are managed through a collaboration amongst the clinical engineering department, finance department and the department owning the equipment. So, we have traditional manufacturer’s contracts on some of our equipment,” Litke says.
He says that since the companies that make the robots in the OR don’t provide training on maintenance, they make use of a service contract. They also use contracts for equipment for which no one has been trained.
“We also have a program called EMMP, Equipment Maintenance Management Program, where we self-insure the equipment. It’s a collaboration between us and the department needing the equipment maintained. We talk with them regarding the best way to maintain it, either through the manufacturer’s contract, through third-party vendors or through training one of our staff on maintenance of the equipment. We determine the best avenue for getting the work done and keeping the costs as minimal as possible,” Litke explains.
One of the team’s primary goals is cross training so that if a specialist goes on vacation, that equipment can be maintained with proficiency.
Completing Conversion Projects
The team has taken on projects in addition to its other daily duties. These have included updating the EHR system, converting a monitoring system and helping acquire additional medical equipment to meet the increased needs caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Recent projects include helping with clinical equipment selection, installation and integration for the Atrium Health Navicent Beverly Knight Olson Children’s Hospital expansion. This also included adding neonatal ICU and observation beds and outfitting six acute and 10 non-acute emergency exam rooms, two trauma bays and a full pediatric imaging suite,” Litke says.
He says that the CE team also participated in the conversion from Philips classic to Philips PIIC iX, and replaced 107 central and overview monitoring stations, multiple servers and network hardware.
“Our department additionally was integral in the conversion from Cerner to the Epic electronic record management system across four hospitals (Atrium Health Navicent The Medical Center, Atrium Health Navicent Baldwin, Atrium Health Navicent Peach and Monroe County Hospital, an Atrium Health Navicent partner). We developed, mapped and verified network connections between patient monitoring systems, capsule integration servers and EPIC Bridges interface engines,” Litke says.
He says that the department also converted from Fetalink to the Obix Obstetric monitoring system, reconfigured and updated barcodes on over 700 Alaris infusion devices and pointed all point-of-care units to a new Carefusion server.
“We worked with multiple vendors at the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic to acquire medical equipment necessary to supply a Georgia Emergency Management Authority 24-bed mobile facility. We were able to wirelessly connect bedside monitors to a central station with a remote viewing station for the welfare and safety of both teammates and patients,” Litke says.
The team remains involved with the biomed community beyond work hours as well.
“We participate in the Georgia Biomed Instrumentation Society as members and hold a position on the board. We receive training and education through the association on an annual basis. Also, the association creates an opportunity to share information with other biomeds and find out how they deal with certain issues,” Litke says.
He says that they are also on the advisory board for the local technical college’s electronics and biomed training program.
“There’s not a lot of awareness about the biomed technology field. We work with them to help maintain that program, so that we have a feeder system to train and develop biomed technicians. In addition, we attend the college’s job fairs to give presentations about what we do and the opportunities that exist for graduates. In fact, most of the people we’ve hired here have come from the local technical college,” Litke adds.
According to the health system, Atrium Health Navicent has made a concerted effort to build partnerships with local educational institutions to create career pipelines, enabling the health system to fill current jobs and help build a job-ready workforce for the future.
Part of Atrium Health Navicent’s success strategy is vested in its CE department, which keeps up to date on its ability to proficiently maintain the medical equipment inventory.
