The Roundup

Abstract

When you see a poster, you may think the subjects are actors or paid models. However, that is not the case with the poster honoring healthcare technology management (HTM) professionals.The poster, released in conjunction with AAMI's HTM Week 2013, includes working professionals and the photo was taken in front of the water fountain outside the Inova Heart and Vascular Institute—part of Inova Fairfax Medical Campus—in Virginia. The men and women are members of the Clinical Engineering team with Inova Technical Dynamics.Milan Seifert, the BMET manager at Inova, says his team is focused on protecting the patient. “Providing exceptional biomedical equipment service to our Inova customers is not just a job for us. It is our number one priority because patient lives depend on it.”To download a copy of the poster and learn about HTM week, please go to www.aami.org/meetings/htmweek/poster.htmlPanama City, FL-based iSirona, which focuses on medical device integration, has named UC Irvine Health as the recipient of its 2012 Innovator of the Year Award. UC Irvine Health is the principal clinical facility for the School of Medicine at the University of California at Irvine.The award is in recognition of the facility's commitment to technological innovation. Recipients must demonstrate the ability to leverage connectivity technology along with improvements to hospital processes and/or patient care.“UC Irvine Health wanted to implement medical device connectivity as a key component of its newly built, state-of-the-art hospital,” said iSirona President Peter Witonsky in a statement. “The hospital is committed to integrating the latest technological advances with cutting-edge research to provide the highest level of patient care. UC Irvine accomplished this with great success, and we applaud their vision as well as their ability to turn that vision into reality.”The Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) will hold a public workshop June 24–25 at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) White Oak Campus in Silver Spring, MD, focusing on the performance of medical devices in women. The workshop will be the launching point of the new Health of Women Program.The HoW program is designed to bring together clinicians, researchers, academics, government agencies, industry, and advocacy groups to strategize about ways to improve women's health.Among the topics slated for discussion are recruiting and retention strategies in device trials; prioritization of research areas related to women's health; and identification of unmet medical needs.For more information, please go to www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/NewsEvents/WorkshopsConferences/ucm346073.htm.With an aging population and such chronic conditions as diabetes and heart disease on the rise, the United States can expect to see the remote patient monitoring (RPM) market reach $296.5 million by 2019, up from $104.5 million in 2012, according to a new analysis by GBI Research.The authors of Remote Patient Monitoring Market to 2019 – Potential to Reduce Healthcare Cost Burden and Improve Quality of Care to Drive Future Growth say RPM can help state healthcare systems reduce costs. The report highlights a Biotronik trial evaluating the remote follow-up of patients receiving implantable cardioverter defibrillators for prophylatic therapy. The estimated savings per patient per year was $915.50, and $141.40 per person per year on transportation costs.RPM also can help reduce the burden on the healthcare workforce. The U.S. alone is expected to face a shortage of over 120,000 healthcare professionals by 2025, according to the report.Despite the advantages, hospitals do face challenges with RPM use, the report notes. They only benefit from remote monitoring if the technology reduces the length of stay, with a reduction in the number of hospitalizations generally leading to cuts in budgets or reimbursement. Healthcare practitioners and patients also need to learn how to use RPM devices.There was a big career move this spring for a well-known figure in the healthcare technology community. Brian Poplin is the new president and chief operating officer of Medical Staffing Network (MSN), based in Boca Raton, FL.Poplin began his career as a biomedical equipment technician, working his way up to become president of ARAMARK Healthcare Technologies. He resigned in April to take the new job with MSN.“This is an exciting opportunity and one that I am very much looking forward to getting under way,” Poplin said in an e-mail to family, friends, and colleagues.Yelp is a great way to find a new restaurant or to write a review of a store. Consumers also are turning to online services such as Yelp and Facebook to help them find doctors, hospitals, and even medical devices. This situation exists because there is no single source for discovering healthcare providers, according to a report from PwC's Health Research Institute (HRI). Furthermore, those companies that translate feedback into better quality service are reaping the rewards of increased demand.About 48% of consumers surveyed by HRI said they had read online healthcare reviews, while 24% said they had written one. Once those surveyed had read reviews, 68% said they used them to decide where to get healthcare.“Healthcare organizations are increasingly operating in a world in which the voice of the consumer impacts the bottom line, and where consumer experience is now a matter of dollars and cents,” said Kelly Barnes, PwC's U.S. health industry leader, in a prepared statement. “As consumerism in healthcare gains steam, customer feedback has become a determining factor in the success of health organizations. Ratings connect consumers' experience to quality, and quality connects to financial performance, market share, and reputation.”Whether to install a hybrid operating room (OR) is a hot topic—and an expensive proposition—in healthcare these days. A paper from ECRI Institute is designed to help C-Suite executives and those making purchasing decisions implement a successful hybrid OR strategy. It focuses on endovascular hybrid ORs, which can be used in high-risk minimally invasive cardiovascular procedures.As the paper notes, there has been a lot of pressure on hospital executives to purchase hybrid ORs, even if an OR-capable cardiac catheterization lab is sufficient. Furthermore, installing a hybrid OR requires space— 900–1,400 square feet—and additional staff training. Cost also is an issue.“Hybrid ORs cost about $3 [million] to $4 million on average, so short-term return on investment is questionable,” said Jennifer Myers, ECRI Institute's vice president of SELECT health technology services. ”However, we're seeing a lot of interest by hospitals who anticipate long-term benefits of using an endovascular hybrid OR to perform high-risk minimally invasive cardiac procedures.”To download the paper, please go to www.ecri.org/hybrid.As more healthcare facilities work to get electronic health record (EHR) systems up and running, a new survey points to persistent security concerns. The survey includes responses from 200 chief information security officers (CISO), chief information officers, directors of information technology, and other senior leaders at hospitals, insurers, and other healthcare facilities.“The more than 570 major breach incidents added to the federal tally since September 2009 also offer a grim reminder that there, indeed, is plenty of security work yet to be done,” said Howard Anderson, news editor at the Information Security Media Group, which released the survey results.The survey highlighted six hot topics in healthcare information security:Data breaches are of great concern to healthcare facilities, yet only 35% of responders say they have experienced one of any size over the past 12 months. The top type of information breach was misdirected faxes or mailings (40%), followed by an insider attack, including record snooping or identity theft (29%), and lost or stolen unencrypted electronic device or media (24%).To prevent future breaches, 73% of responders said they would increase training on privacy and security issues.In terms of information security priorities for the coming year, 55% of responders mentioned improving regulatory compliance efforts; 45% said improving security awareness and education; and 34% identified preventing and detecting breaches as a top priority.The survey also found concern about cloud computing. When asked whether their organizations used cloud computing for remotely hosted applications, 64% said no. The big reason: lack of transparency on the part of vendors to reveal their penetration test results.“The reality is that a lot of companies don't want to be transparent about their testing,” said Jennings Aske, CISO and chief privacy officer at Partners Healthcare.Touch Bionics, a spinoff of the United Kingdom's National Health Service, has unveiled the i-limb Ultra Revolution, a prosthetic hand featuring a powered rotating thumb and 24 grip options. According to the company, the offering is the first upper limb prosthesis that can be controlled by a mobile application.The thumb's rotation can be controlled directly by the wearer's muscle signals, or can move automatically into position as part of a pre-set grip pattern or gesture. The new biosim mobile control application is compatible with Apple products and gives the wearer expanded control capability.“The i-limb Ultra Revolution is the most advanced, and easy to use prosthesis that I have ever worn,” said Bertolt Meyer, an i-limb wearer, in a prepared statement. “Powered thumb rotation, combined with the mobile app and quick access to all these new grips, gives me natural hand function that I never imagined would be possible.”Adopting a Lean approach to improving systems engineering (SE) visibility in a large operational system and influencing colleagues and healthcare decision makers about SE are just two hot topics to be discussed at the 2013 INCOSE International Symposium scheduled for June 24–27 in Philadelphia.INCOSE, which stands for the International Council on Systems Engineering, is a not-for-profit organization that promotes international collaboration in SE practice, education, and research, and has more than 8,000 members worldwide, according to its website.During the INCOSE event, the Biomedical & Healthcare Working Group will host a number of sessions, including a roundtable on SE challenges. AAMI is a participating organization, along with GE Healthcare, Medtronic, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Partners Healthcare, and Philips.What can the nuclear power and healthcare industries learn from one another? That question is the focus of a new AAMI publication, Risk and Reliability in Healthcare and Nuclear Power: Learning from Each Other, the result of a two-day workshop held last July to promote shared learning and gains in risk management and reliability.The 120-page publication was edited by AAMI President Mary Logan, Bruce Hallbert, PhD, director of nuclear science enabling technologies at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), and Matthew Weinger, MD, professor of anesthesiology, biomedical informatics, and medical education at Vanderbilt University. It features eight chapters written by industry experts, who review the similarities and differences between the fields in four topic areas:“The workshop was a first step at making the advancements in two safety critical fields available to one another,” Logan said. “The invited attendees started with curiosity about what healthcare could learn from nuclear power and vice versa. By the end of their two days together, it was obvious that we were onto something important.”The monograph is available for sale at the AAMI Store in hard copy and PDF formats. The list price for the hard copy is $60, but it is available to AAMI members for $35. The PDF version is free to AAMI members; nonmembers pay $60. To purchase the report, please go to http://my.aami.org/store.Boston Scientific has debuted its Precision Spectra Spinal Cord Stimulator system (SCS) in the United States. The system is designed to provide relief for a range of patients suffering from chronic pain.More than 100 million Americans suffer from chronic pain, according to a company press release. Stimulators such as Boston Scientific's new offering deliver electrical pulses from an implantable generator to leads with stimulating contacts to mask pain signals traveling to the brain. The Precision system includes Illumina 3D software to improve control of the stimulation field.“The Precision Spectra system represents a paradigm shift in spinal cord stimulation,” said Giancarlo Barolat, MD, medical director of Barolat Neuroscience in Denver. “The Illumina 3D Software is the first SCS programming technology based on advanced anatomical and scientific principles. When combined with 32 contacts and four lead ports—twice that of any other SCS system—the Precision Spectra technology gives physicians more flexibility to customize therapy for patients,” he added.AAMI's journals and newsletter have won three honors, including two gold awards, in a nationwide competition of healthcare publications.In the 2012 contest organized by the American Society of Healthcare Publication Editors, AAMI won: