by
Sean Ruck, Contributing Editor | June 01, 2015
From the May 2015 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
HealthCare Business News caught up with Mary Logan for our annual check-in to learn the latest happenings at the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation.
HCBN: Last year, you talked about taking on responsibility for a standards committee dealing with anesthesia and respiratory technology. Are there any updates surrounding that effort?
ML: Ramping up standards work takes time, but there are definitely updates. First, though I want to say that the most important benefit of AAMI taking over this work has been the increased opportunity to collaborate with the American Association of Anesthesiologists. It’s a great group to work with because they’re often very technologically oriented. So they have fantastic insight into technology even beyond just the anesthetic and respiratory-related technology.
Regarding the updates, we think there will be more than 10 standards this year adopted as American National standards. Next year, we’ll be hosting an international meeting for an international standards committee with 29 countries participating and 23 more observing. So that’s an exciting thing for AAMI to lead and prepare for.
HCBN: It been nearly a year since AAMI University was launched. How is that coming along?
ML: Since the site launched on May 31, we’ve had over 7,000 individuals create personalized dashboards that can be used to manage and track their personal certification information. We’ve launched four online programs for the industry as well: effective communications, pillars of leadership, training in a regulated environment; and documents and records management. AAMI University’s system offers Instant access to training certificates and webinars and we continue to add more and more content. We launched the university with the content we already had for our industry training courses and then turned them into online materials. As we develop more training modules, it gives us the opportunity to increase the library. The exams have also moved online which saves attendees travel dollars.
HCBN: Are there any big changes or new items being introduced into the university?
ML: Courses that we’re going to launch are mostly industry courses, but some will be of interest to hospitals. There’s a course on crisis management and another on internal auditing in a regulatory environment and yet another on demystifying ethylene oxide calculations. We’re also partnering with Virginia Tech to offer a course on international standards for electrical safety. It’s our first experience partnering with a university offering four-year degrees.
