by
Lauren Dubinsky, Senior Reporter | September 12, 2022
From the September 2022 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
To stress his point, he cited “To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System” by the Institute of Medicine (U.S.) Committee on Quality of Health Care in America: “…the problem is not bad people in health care — it is that good people are working in bad systems that need to be made safer.”
What’s new?
In the last 12 months, the FMD companies have been hard at work making improvements to their existing products and developing revolutionary new ones.
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Aegys made engineering updates to the TechGate Auto’s obstruction detection system. It mounted twin Keyence Class 2 Optical Lasers to the LED-lit barrier arm and incorporated functional algorithms that retract or engage the barrier arm only when the path is clear, and operate dynamically while the arm is in motion.
Metrasens’ research and development team has been working hard on a new product that will be unveiled at this year’s RSNA Conference and Expo in November. Although Taylor is not able to go into specifics ahead of the launch, he did divulge that it will “deliver on both performance as well as efficiency in managing projectile risks in the MR suite.”
Kopp Development introduced its most comprehensive safety solution, the FerrAlert Encompass Local Edition (LE). It can automatically log ferromagnetic entries, door openings, sensor alarm positions, and pause function as well as provide complete, verifiable data for JC inspections and American College of Radiology (ACR) compliance.
What’s more, it can conduct root cause analysis investigations and the reports can be shared throughout the hospital system. To Gilk, this is the most important feature of an FMD product.
“To my mind, the most important feature is the degree to which the site is willing and able to integrate the information that a ferromagnetic detection system provides into their workflow process,” he said. “There is no shortage of sites that talk about how the magnetic detector goes off all the time and they’ve just learned to tune it out.”
That information could be used to explain why the alarm is going off so frequently. It can serve as an information feedback loop to provide a quality control measure of how effective a site’s upstream screening processes are.
“Integrating the ferromagnetic detection system and the information that it provides in patient management and upstream screening is the secret sauce to the more effective deployment of ferromagnetic detection,” said Gilk.
We need safety regulations, and we need them now
Safety solutions can vary, but an area where standardization is needed is regulation. There is no shortage of regulation oversight for nuclear medicine, hot labs, fluoroscopy and ionizing radiation in general, yet MR has none of that when it comes to safety.
