HTM’s Role: Navigating network creep in healthcare

Medical devices are more network-connected than ever before. Healthcare Technology Management (HTM) departments need the expertise and personnel to manage them.

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Medical devices used in patient care are becoming more network-connected, application-dependent and further integrated into remote systems or servers than ever before. While patient monitors and wireless telemetry have been used to communicate waveforms and patient alarms from the patient room to nurses’ stations for decades, they have typically sat on their own networks with little risk. Now:

Medical devices have been added to both wired and wireless hospital networks.
The amount of electronic patient health information (ePHI) stored on the individual devices has increased.
The amount of machines that can access information virtually has grown.

It is important that Healthcare Technology Management (HTM) keeps pace with this network creep.

Time for a team

A single subject matter expert who knows the basics is no longer enough. With connected devices installed in nearly every clinical department — including surgery, cardiovascular, endoscopy, dialysis, sterile processing, oncology, stress testing, med surg, laboratory, labor and delivery and more — HTM departments must have the necessary expertise and personnel to manage them. Here’s why.

The importance of HTM data collection

When a critical medical device requires repair, its downtime, or Mean Time to Repair (MTTR), can significantly impact patient wellbeing and outcomes. With a full collection of data elements, HTM teams can reduce this MTTR to get devices back in rotation quicker. To ensure repairs can be made as quickly as possible, HTM teams should have robust data and information needed for network recovery on hand for all hospital assets.

Identifying assets and capabilities

To build the foundation of a solid asset management program, healthcare technology management services teams must identify all assets within the hospital and understand their capabilities and connectivity. With the evolution of connected medical devices discussed above, there is additional data that needs to be collected. As a response to network connectivity and integration into applications like Electronic Medical Records (EMR), PACS, or MUSE, HTM programs should track AETitle, Hostname, IP address and MAC address in addition to a device’s manufacturer, model and serial number.

This device information enables technicians to quickly restore clinical functionality when a device fails, while the capabilities and connectivity information empowers a strong HTM cybersecurity program by providing visibility into where protected data lives and who has access to it.

Preparing for network recovery

When a device’s failure affects the network connection, there are several attributes an HTM team should have readily available for network recovery. An IP address, any specific subnets, default gateways and the DNS server are all crucial to the device’s ability to connect to and communicate with the network. Other network-critical attributes like a port number, VLAN, server IP address, operating system and version and primary application and version should all be notated in case a hard drive fails or an operating system error occurs that requires reload.

Managing the volume of HTM data

With the volume of HTM data required to best manage the growing number of devices on the network, having a team of experts can help. Sodexo Healthcare HTM prioritizes in-depth data collection to get a full understanding of all the critical components necessary for medical devices to stay network connected and integrated with the most important applications that improve patient outcomes.

Reduce device downtime while protecting patient data.

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