Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
local versus the national disaster plan? What do
you expect as a contractual agreement to be the
vendor's response to a hospital disaster?
In rural communities, just having the vendor
agree to do all that is possible to show up within
24 hours of a disaster may be the best that is
expected. In urban areas specific high risk hospi-
tals such as University hospitals and/or desig-
nated trauma centers should receive immediate
(self dispatch) priority to a disaster situation. Other
hospitals in the community should agree that the
vendor will respond to the trauma center and not
be relieved until all hospitals have been called
and validated that the vendor is not required at
any other hospital. Of course, many vendors have
multiple service representatives, so they may be
dispatched to those critical hospitals as determined
by the community.
Parts availability is and continues to be a concern
in our global economy. Rapid air transport, world-
wide requirements, minimization of inventory all
work together to form a recipe for parts short-
ages in a disaster. The best tool hospitals have
is to assure local parts inventories and assure
that uptime commitments are met, including after
action discussions of any significant down time due
to failure to receive parts. If parts are not available
during non-disaster situations, parts availability
may be severely compromised during a disaster.
Work with the vendor community to minimize
parts issues at every opportunity, including offering
hospital space for critical parts.
It is clearly the hospital's responsibility to work
with those vendors critical for continued patient
care and assure that the vendor understands its role
in the hospital's overall emergency preparedness
plan and response.
Is there a list of all FDA devices with software in
your facility? Is spare software or mirrors available
for this technology in-house or from the vendor?
What is the vendor's current response for replacing
software of the generation of technology installed
in your hospital?
Is the Clinical Engineering business able to func-
tion after the disaster? Most importantly is the
medical equipment database backed up routinely,
secured offsite and in paper form?
Are critical paper records stored in a secure loca-
tion or in electronic format in a redundant manner?
Do all FDA regulated servers have routine
backups of entire database and operating systems?
Are these backups stored in a secure off site
location?
Business resumption planning may be as simple
as installing UPS's on critical components so that
the systems have one less mechanism to fail.
16.10 Departmental Response
Despite your best wishes your hospital has been
affected by a disaster. As most Clinical Engi-
neering departments do not function 24
7, the
time of day when the disaster occurred has signif-
icant impact on how the response is implemented.
Could the section below be done in a more
formal—less conversational—manner?
What mechanism is in place to assure that
all Clinical Engineering staff (including students,
interns and vendors that may be on campus) are
accounted for? How do you know who is out of
the building? Where are they? Who called in sick?
Who has the day off? Are there satellite shops? Are
all shops and staff accounted for? It is the respon-
sibility of everyone in the department to assure all
staff is accounted for. Priority should be placed
upon assuring all staff are accounted for initially in
a crisis situation. An attempt to locate missing staff
shoud be made. Staff not accounted for should be
reported to the Command Center.
Departmental EICS
Who is in charge of the Clinical Engineering
Department? Is the Director in the hospital or out
of state at a convention? Who is in charge in the
Directors absence? What needs to be done? All
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16.9 Business Resumption Planning
While this is a new buzz word in today's Informa-
tion Technology (IT) planning, it has really been
occurring for years in the Clinical Engineering
field. Basically, do you have what you need to
recreate your “business” to allow relatively seam-
less operations independent of the affects of a
disaster?
