By K. Richard Douglas
There are many American cities with counterparts in England from which they have derived their names. Taunton, Massachusetts is one of them. First organized in 1639, the city was named after Taunton, England. The American city’s objection to English taxation was one of the precursors to the Revolutionary War.
Modern day Taunton is a much different place, and while people are still not happy with taxes, they are happy with the local health care options. One of those health care providers is Morton Hospital; a member of the Steward Health Care System. The hospital has been recognized with a “Best Place to Work” award.
Morton Hospital in Taunton is a 144-bed acute care community hospital that serves the residents of southeastern Massachusetts. The hospital’s medical equipment is managed by its two-member clinical engineering team. They get assistance from regional management when needed.
“Morton Hospital is an acute care community hospital that is one of 30-plus U.S. hospitals in the Steward Health Care network. The clinical engineering department at Morton Hospital is a two-person shop with a regional and national director that assist as needed. The in-house shop is led by Christopher Collins, who has been in the field since 2005. Chris has been working at Morton Hospital for seven years, but has worked within this larger network of hospitals for 16 years,” says Cal Knowles, regional director of clinical engineering for Steward Healthcare’s Northeast region.
He says that Berti Blain is the other biomedical technician who works alongside Collins.
“Berti is a newer technician who recently graduated with his biomedical technology degree in 2021. Berti started at Morton Hospital in April of 2022 but previously interned at one of our sister hospitals in the region. The two technicians support 2,058 pieces of equipment throughout the main campus and offsites,” Knowles says.
The offsites include an outpatient rehabilitation and physical therapy center, audiology, a women’s health center, a sleep lab and a primary care center.
Knowles says that the clinical engineering department maintains all the medical equipment within the facility, primarily handles all the repair and maintenance on the biomedical pieces and will take first-look on other more advanced equipment, such as diagnostic imaging equipment, that they have under contract with third parties. In doing so, the technicians are sometimes able to maintain a better uptime for the department instead of having to wait to have the third party come in for a small issue on a device.
“Although the technicians at Morton Hospital work directly for the hospital, Steward Health Care, as a whole, has contracted out a majority of the biomedical services and diagnostic imaging services to a third-party vendor. This vendor is responsible for the preventive maintenance and repair of diagnostic imaging. They provide the hospital employees at Morton with the parts required for preventive maintenance and repairs of the other medical equipment within the Morton Hospital umbrella, but the actual repair and maintenance of these items is done by our in-house technicians, Chris and Berti,” Knowles says.
Small Department with Big Results
The two-man shop has taken on several projects, including high-tech upgrades and capital purchase insights.
“We have had a few projects in recent years that include the implementation of SIS, which is an anesthesia electronic medical record system. The technicians worked with IT to get the new system set up and installed for use with our anesthesia machines. By installing a system like this, the vital signs of the patient that show on the patient monitor of the anesthesia machine now go straight into an electronic medical record for device integration. There is no longer a potential for human error and documentation is precisely at the correct time interval,” Knowles says.
Recently, Morton Hospital upgraded two of its telemetry floors, which required ample planning and implementation to get the systems installed without impacting patient care. The patient monitoring systems, as well as complete wireless infrastructure that the patient monitoring system relies on, that were previously installed, were end of life.
“By installing this new monitoring system, we ensured new cabling was pulled for the new wireless network. We also made sure that the new monitoring system integrated with the nursing phones on the floor. By doing this, the nursing group can see all red alarms for urgent response on their devices,” Knowles says.
The hospital recently opened a comprehensive addiction program (MORCAP) within the hospital.
“Chris and Berti were essential to making sure the proper equipment was purchased and installed for this project. Part of this process was performing an incoming inspection and loading all new equipment into the CMMS to start its documentation life cycle,” Knowles says.
He says that in the endoscopy department, a procedure documentation software was installed. This required configuration of the endoscopy equipment from the technicians to get the system operating as intended.
Morton Hospital also went through a pump conversion, which involved swapping out all of the infusion pumps with a newer model from a different manufacturer.
“This took a lot of coordination and configuration to get these pumps set up and configured to connect to our network wirelessly,” Knowles says.
The two-person team didn’t stop with those projects.
“The technicians at Morton Hospital needed to set up a temporary telemetry system during COVID to help care for the influx of patients. An unused department was outfitted with a fully functional telemetry system that supported this new temporary 20-bed unit. The technicians worked to make sure all required equipment was set up and installed, which also included outfitting each room with oxygen flowmeters and suction regulators,” Knowles says.
The department also converted anesthesia machines by re-pinning connections to the monitors which allowed these anesthesia machines to be utilized as ventilators and relay that information to the patient monitor and patient file.
“In an effort to upgrade a UPS for nuclear medicine, an ILSM was created to allow construction to bore through walls to run conduit so we could connect new UPS to our nuclear medicine camera. This was not part of the initial scope, and the biomed technicians were integral in pausing the project to bring the facility and infection control leads into the space, so that they could assess and issue the correct documentation to move forward,” Knowles says.
He says that the technicians were also problem solvers by not replacing the UPS with a complete like-model. They researched and found that they could get a bit more powerful UPS to support the current nuclear medicine camera but this new UPS could also support a newer nuclear medicine camera. This was integral to the process as it will help save money in a few years when this device is slated for replacement.
Despite being a two-person department, the biomeds at Morton Hospital go above and beyond.
“Besides the day-to-day work, the biomed technicians are also involved in committees such as the EOC and fall committee. They also get involved with nursing education when new equipment comes in to be sure staff knows how to properly use the equipment. They work with the departments on scoping out new initiatives and will get quotes from the manufacturers. They truly are the go-to department at the hospital to help wherever needed,” Knowles says.
With help from leadership, the biomed team at Morton keeps on top of all equipment successfully.
