By Steve Yelton
For many years at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College, we have had exceptional collaboration among programs within our division and the college in general. This has become even more important recently with the importance of the clinical engineering – healthcare technology management (HTM) collaboration and cybersecurity within our field.
I have previously discussed our collaborations between HTM, nursing, electronics and computer science. We have used common laboratories as well as shared coursework. More recently, we have collaborated with our computer network engineering technology-cybersecurity major to allow HTM students to graduate with skills associated with security planning, risk mitigation and related documentation requirements.
This collaboration has been very popular among our students as well as our employers. I would like to describe how we have utilized this in the past and how we managed the process.
When I was a full-time program chairman at the college, I worked with The Christ Hospital Health Network in Cincinnati, Ohio to produce a collaborative educational program that would enable HTM students to add coursework in information technology (IT) to their core HTM program to help prepare them for the CE-IT area of HTM. These students typically were employed as cooperative education students by the hospital. We also offered courses to current full-time employees in HTM to pursue education in information technologies. Conversely, we offered current IT employees the opportunity to pursue coursework in HTM to enable them to move into the CE-IT area. We are now expanding this opportunity in the cybersecurity arena. We follow the same model as we did with the CE-IT collaboration.
The typical coursework that the HTM student or graduate pursues in the cybersecurity program is varied. They start off with additional network communications courses, server administration, computer programming languages, database design and IT management. In addition to these courses, that are common to most of our networking programs, the students also pursue courses in information risk management, network security design and IT documentation. An important part of this additional coursework in a capstone project related to cybersecurity. We enable current full-time employees to integrate this project into their live work experience. Some of the participants in this collaboration could choose to complete extensive additional coursework to attain an additional degree, some could attain an additional major and some may just complete additional coursework.
Many years ago, we did some interesting studies with respect to the success of these educational collaborations as it related to the individual student. The questions that the employer asked was: “Is it easier for an IT student to learn HTM or an HTM student to learn IT?” Which type of employee should I recruit into the program?” The employers felt that the HTM student tended to be more hardware-oriented and the IT student tended to be more software-oriented. After studying this for several years, we were not able to arrive at an answer except that “it depends on the person.” I’m sure that many of you have opinions on this subject. The bottom line is: “There are great opportunities for everyone.” Honestly, we had great successes both ways. We really didn’t have anyone who didn’t work out since the person who pursued this opportunity had a great desire to move into this area.
In addition to colleges offering coursework in cybersecurity, we have all seen many other opportunities for continuing education. Being active in AAMI, I found that cybersecurity is an extremely important topic both in educational programs and at the AAMI eXchange. As we came out of COVID-19 quarantine and were able to return to attending meetings face to face, we found that a lot had changed while we were gone. Not the least of which was cybersecurity. I found lots of educational opportunities at last year’s eXchange, both in cybersecurity educational sessions and opportunities among vendors in the exhibit hall and conversations among attendees.
AAMI recognizes that cybersecurity is a very important topic in the HTM field. AAMI has an HTM Cybersecurity Resources Page on its website: https://aami.org/htm/htm-cybersecurity-page. This page has links to AAMI virtual training, cybersecurity resources for HTM professionals, as well as links to cybersecurity information sharing organizations and links to HTM cybersecurity tools and resources. I have found this page to be very helpful in gaining varied information related to cybersecurity.
For any of you who are interested in attaining more information on cybersecurity, I would recommend AAMI’s featured collections on cybersecurity at aami.org/home/WhoWeServe/cybersecurity. The AAMI website states, “This collection contains AAMI standards, technical information reports, books, articles from BI&T, as well as other resources that will help you make the decisions needed to safeguard your data. Take advantage of this collection’s discounted price – plus receive multiple resources to help you ensure the security of your system.”
Steven J. Yelton, P.E.; is a senior HTM engineer for a large health network in Cincinnati, Ohio and is a professor emeritus at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College.
