Clinical Engineers Manage Health Technology to Improve Clinical Outcomes

  ATLANTA, GA, USA - 06/01/2018 (PRESS RELEASE JET)

Health Technology (HT) is vital to global health care.   The dependence of health, rehabilitation, and wellness programs on health technology for the delivery of services has never been greater.  It is essential that HT be optimally managed; biomedical and clinical engineers (CE) have been recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO) as essential to providing these management skills; see http://www.who.int/medical_devices/policies/who_resolutions/en/. 

In 2016, supporting this critical HT utilization, Clinical Engineering evidence in the form of Success Stories was captured in 150 case studies from 90 countries, and presented to health ministry leaders at the WHO World Health Assembly, http://cedglobal.org/?s=health+technologies.   Continuing in 2017, an additional 250 studies, now from a total of 125 countries, were added from review of published presentations. The full set of stories demonstrates improved processes and clinical outcomes across 6 categories: Access, Innovation, Health Systems, Management, e-Technology, and Safety & Quality. The additional stories were largely drawn from two global meetings in 2017: WHO’s Third Global Forum on Medical Devices http://www.who.int/medical_devices/en/ and IFMBE CED’s II ICEHTMC http://www.icehtmc.com/, and http://cedglobal.org/. 

Detail

Over the past fifty years growing concerns among Clinical Engineering (CE) professionals, about lack of knowledge by government agencies and other key stakeholders, coupled with limited recognition for their vast contributions to the safe and effective creation and deployment of HT, led to these evidence-based studies to address the concerns. 

For example, in the USA and globally, knowledge about and recognition for the professionals of CE community who provide critical services will help recruit students and future practitioners into this needed field, according to the USA Department of Labor https://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/biomedical-engineers.htm. A key question has been: is CE practice important for health, rehabilitation, and wellness programs, and are CE contributions recognized? 

A Special Session highlighting these international stories will be presented next week at the World Congress on Medical Physics and Biomedical/Clinical Engineering IUPESM WC2018 https://guarant.topinfo.cz/iupesm2018/?page=id,conference.programme-book&lang=en in Prague.These results demonstrate a resounding Yes! to the question above regarding the need for more wide-spread global Clinical Engineering practice.

Contact
To learn more about this study, please contact:
Tom Judd
IFMBE CED Secretary
ifmbe.ced.secretariat@gmail.com