Medical equipment breakdown in your hospital isn't news. However, the consequences of any equipment failure are usually far-reaching. After an occurrence, you could face anything from inefficiency and downtime to compromised patient care or improper diagnosis.
A Healthcare Technology Management (HTM) team helps prevent equipment breakdown. In this comprehensive beginner's guide, you’ll learn more about the following:
First up, defining HTM.
HTM is the team at healthcare systems primarily responsible for applying and implementing medical technology to optimize healthcare delivery in a cost-effective manner in hospital equipment maintenance. They ensure medical assets are well maintained, properly configured, and function safely as part of the patient care team.
HTM technicians may go into patient rooms and help nurses with the operation of medical equipment. They are ultimately driven by patient safety and regulatory compliance. Additionally, they are technology savvy and very good with digital resources.
At the basic level, a HTM professional is an equipment manager tasked with providing clinical staff and other end-users with medical equipment knowledge and technologies.
A HTM professional has a wide variety of responsibilities when it comes to managing equipment. On a day-to-day basis, they:
Their responsibilities as patient care team members also include:
Finally, in managerial or directorial positions, HTM professionals assume the daily management duties of the department and healthcare technologies. Some of their key responsibilities include:
The big difference between healthcare Facility departments and HTM departments has to do with work orders and assets.
Facility departments manage work orders that may include assets, such as HVAC units. On the other hand, HTM departments manage assets that may include work orders, such as Preventive Maintenance and Hazard/Recalls.
Like any other healthcare facility department, the HTM department is guided by a set of regulatory standards that the stakeholders must comply with. Here's a list of some of the bodies that define and ensure these standards, including a breakdown of what they do:
TJC is a healthcare organization and programs accreditation body tasked with:
DNV is an international accredited registrar and classification society headquartered in Norway. Among other responsibilities, the organization is tasked with:
The state health department exists in every state across the U.S.. It is a public health body involved with licensing healthcare professionals and collecting vital health records, among other roles. In the HTM sector, the body conducts regular surveys and verifies previous surveys.
CAP is a world-leading organization of board-certified pathologists. Beyond that, it serves the public by advocating and fostering best practices in pathology and laboratory medicine. Some of its duties include:
Other additional known HTM regulatory influencers include the following:
Hopefully, this guide laying out HTM basics was insightful and you learned more about HTM professionals and how they help ensure that your hospitals and health systems are always safe for patients, staff, and visitors.
At FSI, we custom-built our CMMS for healthcare maintenance needs. That includes both Facilities and HTM.
If you’d like to learn more about enterprise asset management and the tools available to help your HTM team, contact FSI for a demo. We provide the best tools to promote safe and efficient hospital operations. With a cloud-based CMMS purpose-built for healthcare professionals, we help empower efficient operations for healthcare systems.