Survey Finds CE, IT Departments View One Another Warily

Abstract

While technological advances are forcing clinical engineering (CE) and healthcare information technology (IT) professionals to collaborate more than ever, a new survey reveals some striking disparities in the way each group perceives its own priorities and the priorities of the other. For example, while IT professionals list “patient care” as their highest priority, CE professionals perceive patient care to be the least of IT’s priorities. Additionally, whereas CE professionals consider “network management” to be a fairly significant departmental priority, IT professionals perceive network management to be, by far, the lowest of all possible priorities for CE departments. The survey was conducted by the CE-IT Community—a collaboration among AAMI, the American College of Clinical Engineering (ACCE), and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS). The effort is intended to help ease the myriad challenges related to the convergence of medical and information technologies. The survey sought to get a snapshot of the working relationships between CE and IT departments in healthcare facilities, and to identify obstacles that may hinder their ability to work well together. The responses suggest there is a long way to go in helping each group better understand the other. One portion of the survey asked respondents to rate 19 different departmental priorities on a scale of 1–5, with five being the highest priority. IT professionals’ listed “end-user education” and “safety” as high priorities, with CE perceiving those areas as very low priorities for IT. “Technology assessment” was another point of contention, with CE calling it a high priority, and IT perceiving technology assessment as a low CE priority. Ken Olbrish, a system administrator with Main Line Health near Philadelphia and a member of the CE-IT Community’s Steering Committee, says that the survey results “are an illustration of why the work of the CE-IT Community is needed—to try to bring both sides closer together and have a better understanding of one another. There have been these anecdotal perceptions for years from each side about the other, but the survey puts numbers on it.” Steve Merritt, infrastructure engineer with Baystate Health in Massachusetts and a leader of the CE-IT Community, says that some discrepancies in responses about priorities could be the result of differing vocabularies. For example, do words like “maintenance” or “safety” mean the same things to both a clinical engineer and an IT professional? “Making sure both departments are using the same terminology and vocabulary could be one way of smoothing out communication issues between the two,” says Merritt. “Developing a shared vocabulary between CE Patrick Bernat is director of Healthcare Technology Management at AAMI. E-mail: pbernat@aami.org Survey Finds CE, IT Departments View One Another Warily