CE-IT relations, predictive analytics. IoT, the blurring line between medical devices and IT devices - Free Webinar

Joint CMBES - CESO Webinar

Speakers: Elliot Sloane, Tim Zakutney, Samantha Herold, Joseph Ouellette

Elliot Sloane will speak on: 25-years of milestones, influences, impediments, and risks CEs have faced and overcome to integrate clinical and information technologies. Innovations precipitated by COVID-19, including telehealth, telemedicine, AI/ML, and virtual hospitals, and emerging breakthroughs like semi- and fully-autonomous medical devices, will be discussed. This history will be contextualized with surging cyberthreats, closed proprietary technology silos, "valley of death" cycles of hype and technology adoption, critical user-centric support for clinicians/laypersons, challenges of System of Systems Engineering for interdependent systems, and rapidly growing needs and opportunities for CEs to learn, understand, and master the culture, language, demands, limitations, and technical tools of digital health.

Tim Zakutney will speak on: The similarities and differences to traditional IT/IS and Clinical Engineering. The unique and similar challenges they both face on a daily basis. The struggle for quality and responsive technical and clinical support in the arena of changing technological platforms.

Smantha Herold will speak on: Characteristics of Clinical Engineers and IT regarding support and the need for understanding and collaboration between the groups. IT often doesn’t understand the implications of equipment being down and the urgency from clinical staff to make it right for the patient. Additionally, when discussing upgrading OS, etc., IT is often confused by the black box medical device (“why can’t I just swap out all Windows 7 machines with Windows 10”). On the other hand, CE is often new to change management and some other IT oversight and new security measures can seem frustrating, but we need to understand why those measures are implemented.

Joseph Ouellette will speak on: How the push for increased interoperability and electronic documentation of information has forced the need for Clinical Engineers who can be the intermediaries between clinicians and ITS. What started with the sending of a few vital signs into the EMR has evolved into complex, bi-directional systems requiring extensive technical knowledge to plan, implement, and support.

Speaker Bios

Elliot Sloane, PhD is a CCE whose career has been devoted to the confluence of clinical and information technologies to improve patient safety, clinical efficacy and diffusion of technologies to improve access, equity, and affordability of health and medical care. He began his career at ECRI, evaluating medical devices and patient incidents, supporting its national field services, designing ECRI's IT infrastructure, and teaching HTA and HTM to global communities with WHO and PAHO. He then helped run a nationwide medical device and pharmaceutical company, MEDIQ/PRN, which supported 24x7 products and services in all 50 states. Since 2000, he has led numerous academic, consulting, standards, policy, and non-profit agency research and education programs, accelerating the convergence and adoption of all manner of clinical and information technologies for patient care.

Timothy Zakutney, MHSc, PEng, CCE, FCMBES is Senior Vice President, Digital Health and Cardiac Technology, Chief Information and Technology Officer at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute. He has a specialty in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo along with a Masters in Heath Science in Clinical Engineering from the University of Toronto. Tim provides leadership and guidance surrounding medical and biomedical technology issues for healthcare, his portfolio of responsibilities includes Information Technology, Cardiac Imaging, Biomedical Engineering, Facilities and Capital Projects, Radiation Safety, Radiochemistry.

Samantha Herold, CCE is a Senior Manager in Clinical Engineering at Yale New Haven Health. She is responsible for the Clinical Engineering operations and technical aspects of the Remote Patient Monitoring program. Previously, she was a Clinical Systems Engineer on the Clinical Engineering Integrations team where she led several large interoperability projects. Samantha earned her Master’s Degree in Clinical Engineering from the University of Connecticut and her Master’s Degree in Healthcare Administration from the University of New Haven.

Joe Ouellette is a Senior Manager in Clinical Engineering at Yale New Haven Health, where he has been focusing on biomedical device integration, medical device security, and the integration of CE into ITS for over ten years. He has Master’s Degrees in Clinical Engineering from the University of Connecticut and Healthcare Informatics from Sacred Heart University.