Experts Urge Hospitals to Act on Integration

Abstract

Hospitals have nearly five years to integrate medical devices with electronic health record (EHR) technology, in order to receive money from the federal government. But it’s important that biomeds and clinical engineers take steps now to ensure effective implementation. That was the main message from experts at a symposium during AAMI’s 2010 Annual Conference & Expo in Tampa, FL, in June. Nearly $20 billion in financial incentives was included in the 2009 American Recovery & Reinvestment Act to entice hospitals and physician offices to adopt “meaningful use” of EHRs. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) recently adopted a temporary certification program that authorizes organizations to test and certify EHR products. The first stage of meaningful use is scheduled to begin in 2011 with a set of objectives for hospitals and physicians to meet, with further goals coming in 2013 and 2015. In 2015, the meaningful-use requirements will include medical devices, with testing and technical standards to be released the year before, according to Elliot Sloane, research professor and director of the Health Systems Engineering Program at Drexel University in Philadelphia, and a speaker at the symposium, which was sponsored by the American College of Clinical Engineering (ACCE). “Use your purchasing programs to insist on interoperable technologies,” Sloane said. “Put EHR and software engineering topics on your reading list. Get to know the standards and deploy them.” Also, be ready to anticipate change. “Look at your structures and business model to see whether you are flexible enough to both proactively anticipate change that is coming and react to it,” added Linda Chan, information services manager at New Jersey-based Virtual Health Information Services. “We expanded our help desk to 24x7. We also spent over a year working with biomed and information technology (IT) departments to look at organization structure in support of device integration work, and a lot cross-training is needed.” “Know your systems,” stressed Erin Sparnon, senior project engineer at ECRI Institute. “If you are talking about meaningful use of integrating infusion pumps, think about what systems you have in your hospital right now.” Focus, Sparnon suggested, on some “easy wins” to get the ball rolling. “Maybe some things you can implement by 2011 with little fuss,” Sparnon said. “There might be an easy way to say to hospital administration, ‘Here is what we can Robert King is the editor of AAMI News. E-mail: rking@aami.org Experts Urge Hospitals to Act on Integration