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Subject: Bronx-Lebanon Health Center Location: New York, NY Size: Nonprofit, two-hospital system of 858 beds Staff: 9-person clinical engineering department, outsourced to ARAMARK Healthcare When Ayman Assanassios came on board at Bronx-Lebanon Health Center to manage the outsourced clinical engineering function four years ago, capital equipment acquisition was handled at the department level. No central committee reviewed or coordinated new purchases. Equipment evaluations were inconsistent, and technology planning was done on an ad hoc basis. The result? Equipment varied from department to department; and parts ordering, service, and user training were difficult. As director of clinical engineering at ARAMARK Healthcare, Assanassios knew there was a better way. He launched an effort to create a medical equipment committee to ensure that all departments involved with equipment were on the same page. This included handling recalls and alerts, monitoring user error and physical damage, revamping the acquisition process, and improving technology management throughout the organization. Challenge “Since no committee coordinated medical devices, when it came to ordering equipment, the left hand never knew what the right was doing,” says Assanassios. Since all new equipment was delivered to the clinical engineering department for inspection, Assanassios got a first-hand look at the disjointed purchases. “In the same week, we saw two departments order different makes and models of blood pressure machines. It was tough for biomedical engineering to stock parts, tough for us to train people, and tough for the nurses who rotate among departments to transition to using different machines.” Assanassios also saw other areas of technology management that needed better coordination, including management of equipment recalls and alerts and management of rental equipment. He was pleasantly surprised to get very little resistance to his proposal. “Everyone thought someone else was taking care of things,” he says. “When we pointed out what was going on, people were happy to change.” His department reports to Hiram Torres, administrative director of support services for Bronx-Lebanon, who has been with the hospital for six years and recently began overseeing clinical engineering. It made perfect sense, Torres says, to regularly pull together people from across the organization to focus on equipment issues. “Before Ayman put this committee together, there was a real gap in communication between the departments and the end users,” he says. “We would spend ten minutes in the Environment of Care committee meeting discussing medical equipment, and never really address problems we were having.”

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