Frost & Sullivan's virtual think tank "Best Practices for Managing Patient Monitoring Networks Across the IT and Biomedical Departments," is a free resource (registration required) that aims to identify what best practices successful hospitals were following to keep these critical pieces of infrastructure functional and focused on supporting patient care.
"The growing demand for hospital-based medical device connectivity solutions is expected to result in remarkable changes across the continuum of care," explained Charlie Whelan, Transformational Health Vice President of Consulting in the statement. "Breaking down silos between the biomedical and IT departments is a critical step in reducing the risk of patient monitoring network outages."
Key research findings from the paper include:
· Nearly 80 percent of panelists focused on medical device maintenance in addition to other responsibilities.
· All respondents agreed that maintaining medical device uptime and connectivity was important, with 80 percent indicating that uptime and connectivity were extremely important.
· 60 percent of respondents experienced medical device network glitches or failures on a once-a-month basis.
· Half of respondents reported the biomedical department was responsible for maintaining medical device assets and that the patient monitoring networks fell under a shared responsibility with clinical IT departments.
· Panelists all agreed that network connectivity is a critical measure of their facilities' IT infrastructure and that it was necessary for patient care.
· Panelists cited power outages as a common reason for device networks crashing.
· Although 60 percent of respondents did not currently have systems or protocols in place to proactively monitor their medical device networks, all respondents agreed that proactive monitoring would help their biomed teams improve network uptime.
Using tools like these can help pinpoint network failures, thereby saving trouble-shooting time and delivering faster problem resolutions.
