Staff Report
The recent Webinar Wednesday session “Top-5 Benefits of Improved Device Effectiveness” presented by Medigate Director of Product Marketing Samuel Hill was eligible for 1 credit from the ACI. It was sponsored by Medigate.
In the webinar, Hill shared five of the most common outcomes for improving device effectiveness. Every hospital has thousands of devices that cost thousands of dollars. When one factors in the workflows needed to keep them operational and available for patient care, there is incredible pressure on getting the most from each one. Organizations can uncover critical benefits by incorporating up-to-date inventory with dynamic location and utilization metrics.
Hill provided additional insights during a question-and-answer session. One question was, “Can you specify what is medical device data?”
Hill explained that “what we’re looking at is the data that the medical device communicates about itself on the network. So, it does include some of the pieces of what it is doing, like the specific work that it is performing. But, what we’re mostly interested in is, what does the device say about itself?”
He explained that the data can be used to track equipment and that information can be used to update systems, namely the CMS, specifically in the biomed use case, with accurate data about the device itself.
He also spoke about MAC addresses and how they serve as unique device identifiers for every piece of equipment.
The webinar, including the complete Q&A session, is available for on-demand viewing at WebinarWednesday.live.
The webinar was popular. Attendees provided positive feedback in a post-webinar survey that included the question, “What do you like best about the Webinar Wednesday webinar series?”
“Getting the perspective and some best practices of different vendors, etc. on several topics,” CE Manager William D. said.
“Quick and short topics on things that help us in our jobs,” Program Manager Chad N. said.
Increase Transducer Life
The recent Webinar Wednesday session “Basic Tips and Tricks: How to Increase an Ultrasound Transducers Useful Life” was presented by Larry Nguyen, CEO and CTO of Summit Imaging. The session was sponsored by Summit Imaging and eligible for 1 credit from the ACI.
In this 60-minute webinar, Nguyen provided a demonstration and analysis to educate clinical engineers on common ultrasound transducer handling mistakes as a means to increase the life of their equipment and better serve patients. As health care facilities are catching up on elective procedures, the utilization of ultrasound equipment is significantly increasing. This is a leading indicator of increased ultrasound transducer use and failures. There is good news, a significant amount of failures can be prevented with education and awareness of common accidental handling issues.
Attendees gained additional knowledge from Nguyen during a question-and-answer session toward the end of his presentation. One question was, “Does your technical support team help diagnose probe issues?” He explained that Summit Imaging provides that and added that a large portion of the support is focused on identifying if it’s a machine issue or a transducer issue.
He answered another question by explaining the importance of the early detection of the issues. The complete question-and-answer session is available via the on-demand recording of the webinar at WebinarWednesday.live.
Attendees provided feedback regarding the webinar via a survey that included the question, “What did you like most about today’s webinar?”
“The presenter was prepared, well-informed and provided practical suggestions,” Biomed Manager P. Phillips said.
“All the good information about the differences between the OEM and the generic transducers,” Biomedical Specialist H. Matos said.
“Examples, practical descriptions,” Diagnostic Imaging Physicist A. Browne said.
Connected Medical Device Security
The recent Webinar Wednesday presentation “See. Know. Secure: Simplifying Connected Medical Device Security” by Ordr Director of Healthcare Product Management Ben Stock was eligible for 1 credit from the ACI. The session was sponsored by Ordr.
In this 60-minute webinar, Stock explored simplifying the overwhelming task of keeping connected medical devices protected. Securing connected medical devices can be a daunting task. Stock spent 17 years managing connected medical devices at SSM Health before transitioning to developing products that could address his challenges. In his presentation, he was able to break down the process into three steps and outlined techniques and tools that can be used to identify high-risk devices, understand how they are being used, and implement measures to protect them without interfering with patient care. He explained that there is no one-size-fits-all solution, but there are tools and best practices that can make a seemingly impossible task manageable regardless of the organization’s size.
Stock also answered questions as part of the webinar. One question was, “You mentioned retrospectives, security on one of your slides. What can be done to determine the extent of an event?”
“So, we’re gathering stuff, whether we know that it is malicious or not, and we’re keeping metadata around those flows. So, if an event is determined to have happen, either a known event or a zero-day event, where we don’t necessarily know, it’s going on until a certain point in time,” Stock said. “I mean, you can actually take this data and look at it, and analyze it over time, and see what devices are communicating with, what other devices and, watch the east west traffic and the external traffic to determine how an event took place, where it started, what machines were affected. And basically, build a timeline around the event, and how and what occurred, the things that are captured. You, know, when the first and last team, the communication. What’s talking to what. So, all give you a picture retrospectively of what happened during that event.”
“It gives us a couple things that we can do, we can look at and probably can prevent it in the future, for one,” he added. “And additionally, we can look at what devices were affected, and what we need to focus on to remediate the issue at hand without having to go around and look at every single device that may have been a potential victim.”
The other questions and answers are included in the on-demand recording of the webinar at WebinarWednesday.live.
Attendees provided positive feedback via a post-webinar survey that included the question, “What did you like most about today’s webinar?”
“I really enjoyed the information that was presented and the clarity of the presentation,” said C. Brown, BMET II.
“The simplified explanation of identifying high-risk devices,” said K. Wheeler, BMET III.
“Learning how cybersecurity benefits the hospital in terms of protecting PHI,” Biomed Supervisor A. Bia said.
RTLS & Staff Safety
The session “RTLS & Staff Safety within Behavioral Health Settings” was presented by Stephanie Andersen, managing partner of ZulaFly, and Sandra Rasmussen, senior vice president sales and marketing of Sonitor. It was co-sponsored by Sonitor and ZulaFly and eligible for 1 credit from the ACI.
Andersen and Rasmussen discussed the value add of an RTLS system within behavioral health facilities with a focus on staff safety. Details on the importance of location accuracy, analytics and how alerts are administered were covered during the webinar.
The duo provided additional insights via a question-and-answer session.
One question was, “Can staff alerts be sent to any device?”
Anderson said, “Yes, so out of the box, alerts can be sent via text, email at the mobile app pop up. … So, any communication device that you are already using, we can tie into and send those alerts to.”
Another question was, “How easy is it to add on additional applications?”
Rasmussen replied, “So, from an infrastructure standpoint, if the use case, for example, that we talked about, is staff safety then the technology that is deployed is the same technology that would be used to support additional use cases.”
She said that from an infrastructure standpoint, if the facility is looking to ensure room-level coverage for staff safety, there would not be any, or I would say insignificant additional infrastructure, that would be required.
If additional use cases, such as patient safety or patient locating or asset locating or asset management, are the use cases to be added on then there would be additional tags that would be required, but from an infrastructure standpoint, little, if any, new infrastructure would be required.
Exactly 100 individuals registered for the webinar and a recording of the session is available for on-demand viewing at WebinarWednesday.live.
Attendees provided valuable feedback via a survey that included the prompt, “Give us 3 words to describe today’s webinar.”
“Insightful new technology,” Biomedical Engineer V. Mendoza said.
“Informative, interesting, thought-provoking,” M. Mortensen, CBET, said.
“Interesting, new technology, forward-thinking,” Clinical Engineering Director K. Hoellein said.
For more information, visit WebinarWednesday.live.
