Adding IT to the HTM Toolkit

Email: gstern@aami.org In December 2013, the staff of the Civil War–era Wishard Memorial Hospital in Indianapolis, IN, moved into a gleaming, state-of-the-art facility: the Sidney & Lois Eskenazi Hospital. This transition opened up a new world for Eskenazi Health’s in-house biomedical engineering department, as the facility came loaded with new—and often networked—technology. But all that technology uncovered an issue for the department’s staff of 20 healthcare technology management (HTM) professionals. As most of the technology they would be working with was new and interconnected, a support network—and the related information technology (IT) that went with it—was required. Most of the biomed staff lacked IT training, and they certainly didn’t speak the language of IT. As operations within the growing Eskenazi Health system grew increasingly connected, the path forward became clear—biomeds needed to add IT skills to their toolkit in order to provide the technology support that the healthcare system would need. “In radiology, for example, the reliance on technology—sending and receiving data—was so significant that we couldn’t have any downtime. Biomeds, clinicians, and patients can't afford to have a system down or data not transmitting,” said Matt Dimino, a radiology service technician at Eskenazi Health. “A large portion of our systems and repairs revolved around the software or hardware of a computer or IT system. This forced us to learn more about networking. It forced us to speak the language. We needed to have a solid understanding of what’s ours, versus something being another department’s problem.”