Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago is a highly rated pediatric care facility with a 130 year history. The hospital has a staff of clinicians that includes 1,245 physicians in 70 pediatric specialties. U.S. News and World Report ranked Lurie Children’s within the top 10 hospitals in the country in five pediatric specialty categories in their 2014-15 children’s hospital rankings.
Since September 2009, the biomedical engineering department at Lurie Children’s has been outsourced to Crothall Healthcare Technology Solutions. The 12-member department handles 11,400 assets at the main hospital in downtown Chicago and 10 outpatient locations.
Team members include Director Kelley Harris and Assistant Director Victor Rojo. The group’s Office Manager is Eugenia Bradford. Biomedical techs include Chris Pedrak, Crystal Lott, Dominik Kieca, Israel Gallardo, John Dispensa, Ramadan Kehayov and Victor Sanyn. Imaging techs are Josh Deery and David Leonard. The team also plans to add a medical device integration specialist.
Leadership has the optimal mix of experiences and strengths to lead their team and respond to the needs of a top-notch pediatric organization. Rojo has a broad technical, hands-on skill-set in both biomedical and medical imaging modalities. Harris has an academic technical background, with strengths in the areas of finance, strategy, team development, and building strong customer relationships. The combination works well for the department and the institution.
Ken Gray, administrator of Patient Care Support Services, has direct oversight of the Biomedical Engineering program.
“Kelley and Victor provide the department with the passionate, patient-focused leadership our mission-driven organization demands. They are true partners, and an invaluable component of the Lurie Children’s patient care support services team,” says Gray.
Going Beyond
Crothall collaborated with teams throughout the hospital, when the new facility was built in 2012, to aid in the acquisition and deployment process. The biomed team helped in acquiring equipment that is uniquely well-suited to pediatric patients.
“We provide management and oversight of the hospital’s entire life cycle of medical devices and clinical technologies, including safety, risk management, technical support, financial stewardship, and management of healthcare technologies that are integrated and interoperable,” Harris says.
Subsequent to the transition to the new facility, a significant challenge was identified by the Crothall leadership team. The medical imaging service program was lacking in customer service as well as in skill-set level. In 2014, Kelley and Victor went to work to make change for this service.
“We hired two new imaging technicians, implemented weekly meetings with our department to discuss ongoing issues, as well as to clean up a backlog of documentation and service contracts.”
The changes implemented by Kelley and Victor have now paid dividends and the satisfaction of the program are at an all-time high with the imaging director and the imaging staff.
High-tech Projects
In addition to the group’s more routine tasks, they have tackled some special projects. One of those has been to help ensure the security of PHI in their inventory of devices that store it.
To accomplish this, they are leading a medical device security project. They are evaluating all devices to determine what is currently encrypted. They engage the OEMs to obtain MDS2 forms and determine whether the devices can be encrypted through upgrade or with third-party software. For those devices not able to accept encryption, the team will provide options such as RFID and physical lock-down. All information will be documented in the CMMS and findings will be provided to the Lurie Children’s audit committee.
The most complex project for the team currently is bringing a middleware product online to integrate communication tools.
“Connexall is an event notification management middleware that will be integrated with our current Philips Monitoring system, Voalte phones and Rauland Nurse Call device to meet the needs of our healthcare organization by managing our patient alarm systems, minimize patient fatigue and facilitate the clinical staff response,” Harris says.
The biomed department also keeps on top of evolving technology requirements by working alongside their IT counterparts.
“We have weekly CE/IT integration meetings which involve current projects and incoming projects for the hospital that involve medical device integration with the hospital’s network,” Rojo says.
Crystal Lott is currently completing networking training and recently achieved A+ certification. Lott plays a big role in medical device integration projects. Lott is the primary technologist for physiological monitoring system integration with the EPIC EMR and other ancillary database products.
“The new hospital opened in June 2012, so we have a large number of long-term point-of-sale service contracts we are managing,” Harris says. “All service contracts are monitored by our department and service calls are tracked and recorded in our CMMS.”
“We work very closely with all departments to ensure we are knowledgeable of all service calls. Our goal is to eliminate extra work, such as tracking down a field service technician, for the equipment users. We have a huge task ahead of us to get our team trained and ready to take on the equipment service as service contracts expire,” Harris adds.
The hospital institutes a strict objective of self-audit and self-examination. Biomedical Engineering has worked hard to fully align its business model with that paradigm. This has helped the team reflect the exacting standards that have elevated Lurie Children’s reputation. The department is focused on optimizing its use of technology, improving its professional image and even changing the department name.
The hospital is in constant readiness mode and the department endeavors to reflect that approach. Harris explains that since the hospital is one of the top-ranked providers of pediatric care, the department should be one of the top-ranked HTM departments.
Another goal of the department’s leadership is to get everyone certified within 24 months.
“We have a robust training plan for the year. One of the big initiatives is to have everyone certified,” Harris says.
Some of the department members are attending formal classes, provided by Crothall Healthcare for its coworkers, and others are starting study groups.
A top-ranked hospital deserves a top-ranked biomedical engineering department and that is what this group of HTM professionals strives for every day.