By Steven J. Yelton, P.E., AAMIF
We are currently reviewing our HTM curriculum at Cincinnati State. We are looking into lecture, laboratory and co-operative education experiences. One topic that remains on the forefront of our training needs is emerging technologies specifically in the areas of AI, home-based healthcare and monitoring, and wearable health devices.
Many of our hospital-based employers are supporting home healthcare within their HTM departments and have been doing so for many years. As such, our co-op students who have the opportunity to work in these areas are receiving experience in areas previously not possible. Our students are getting experience in Internet connectivity within the home as well as connection speeds and stability of the connection. Our co-op students are working alongside technicians who go into the patient’s residence to assure that the medical equipment placed within the home is working and communicating properly. The technicians have learned many skills “on the job” that were previously unnecessary.
It is becoming apparent that we are training a different HTM technician than the ones we educated just a decade ago. Our students have always taken courses in electronics, computer systems, programming and computer networking. Now, the students must be adept at evaluating how to remotely connect devices as well as preserving data security and privacy. This is critical where patient data is being collected and stored. It is imperative to protect privacy, data security and cyber threats. This basically requires an HTM-centered cybersecurity course.
Several of our hospital-based employers have cybersecurity experts employed within the HTM department. Since this position has been in-place for many years, in some instances, these experts are very experienced in the threats that occur within medical devices. Our students have had the opportunity to receive some great training from these individuals.
It also became apparent that there must be standards that relate to home healthcare. AAMI has addressed this issue with the standard: ANSI/AAMI HA60601-1-11:2011 (IEC 60601-1-11:2010, MOD), Medical electrical equipment – Part 1–11: General requirements for basic safety and essential performance—Collateral Standard: Requirements for medical electrical equipment and medical electrical systems used in the home healthcare environment.
IEC 60601-1-11, first edition, specifies basic safety and essential performance of medical electrical equipment and systems that are intended by the manufacturer for use in the home healthcare environment. The United States adopted the IEC standard as ANSI/AAMI HA60601-1-11 in 2011 with national deviations. The primary differences are the removal of elder care facilities as a home environment; the modification of certain compliance statements to include inspection of the usability engineering file; and the inclusion of the consideration of the abilities of the lay operator. In addition, some modifications were made to the wording to improve clarity.
With all of this said, we are looking at a significant modification of our HTM curriculum. I thought this was a good time to re-enter this discussion. Now we are addressing the issue of AI training. There are many articles on AI and its influence on health care. This is a very hot topic in our field. I get the opportunity to meet with numerous HTM directors through my role at the hospital and the college. I posed a question to them: “I know that AI is an important topic in health care. I would like to know what you think are important topics that our students should know regarding AI?” Beyond that, we are limited by our board of regents as to the number of credit hours that can be in our curriculum which means that we may need to remove some courses to add new technical courses. With that in mind, “What would you remove?”
The answer that I received was, “Beyond basic AI principles, we don’t know enough about AI to know what new technicians need to know!” They are all in a learning mode and are trying to figure out what is coming. They do acknowledge that AI is appearing rapidly in health technology. An answer to what would your remove was, “Nothing, we need everything that we already teach in addition to the new technologies.”
I hope this spurs some discussions beyond AI and delves into education with respect to AI.