From the perspective of patient safety and cost, ensuring that your hospital's monitoring network is running smoothly is more important than ever with monitoring technology being so intrinsic to patient care. Bud DeGraff, general manager of diagnostic and clinical services at GE Healthcare, has some practical advice for hospitals.

DM: What are some of the common problems hospitals face with medical device networks?
BD: The number of "connected" devices in healthcare has been growing and in response, medical device networks have also grown in size and complexity to support these devices. The increasingly connected healthcare environment has created the need for data that is timely, accurate and available when needed -- so medical device networks now have to be available 24x7. This can be challenging for hospitals, as a complex, always-on system requires increased maintenance and monitoring to ensure that clinical demands are being appropriately supported.

DMN: What are some of the critical issues hospitals should be asking about clinical infrastructure?
BD: Hospitals should be asking many questions about the care of their medical device networks. For example, does the hospital have the right resources with the appropriate skill set to manage the networks from both a technical and clinical aspect? What is the risk of these systems going down and causing disruptions in patient care? Does the facility have adequate procedures and staff in place to respond to a down situation? At one hospital that GE Healthcare has worked with, the network crashed due to waveform gaps that went unaddressed, which meant that clinicians couldn't monitor their patients and important data was lost. The hospital had to station a nurse at each bedside and 150 bedside monitors had to be rented until the problem was fixed. This ended up adding additional cost and waste for the hospital and creating potential risk for patient care.

DMN: Is there a list of steps a hospital or health care facility can take to assess potential issues related to their equipment monitoring network to prevent any issues?
BD: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as they say. This holds true for the care of a medical device network, and a crucial step for any hospital to ensure that the network maintains high levels of uptime (99.9%) is to implement a complete maintenance program with ongoing maintenance, inspections, testing, security, performance, documentation and monitoring.

Part of a rigorous preventative program also includes a thorough annual inspection, testing and documentation to ensure that the network is operating within specifications. In addition, a system that monitors network performance and security 24x7 is a valuable asset, as it alerts the biomed or IT team to any issues with the network in real-time.

DMN: Anything else you want to add that you think hospitals should know about as it relates to their monitoring network?
BD: It is important to keep the IT and biomedical teams up-to-date on current standards for maintenance of their medical device networks (such as MDDS, IEC 80001), as there are ongoing changes in these standards, and to provide staff with regular exposure to training opportunities. Furthermore, IT and biomedical engineers must understand how the clinical team uses the information provided by the network in order to adequately maintain the network.

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