Dustin Telford, CBET
The Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation has released the eighth episode in its ongoing podcast series, developed in partnership with Healthcare Tech Talk. In the latest installment, hosts Terry Baker and Kelley Hill interview Dustin Telford, CBET, an imaging service engineer who has spent 23 years working in a wide range of settings, including universities, hospitals, multi-hospital systems, the United States Army, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. He also serves as president of the Medical Equipment & Technology Association.
Among other topics, Telford touches on the challenges posed by working with third-party vendors and manufacturers, whose goals of maintaining and growing their business may sometimes conflict with biomeds’ mandate to save money. “The most important thing that manufacturers can do is pay attention to what their customers want, and then determine with their customers what they really need,” Telford says. “The best companies out there pay attention to how customers use their equipment, how they want to use their equipment, [and] what new services healthcare is expanding into.”
Telford also emphasizes the critical need for IT knowledge among healthcare technology management (HTM) professionals. “If I were to tell anybody one of the critical elements I think that they’re going to need for this field,…[it] is the distribution of information and the connection between one device and a network of other devices.” While relations between clinical engineering departments and IT staff have a long way to go at many organizations, Telford says, “in any good organization nowadays, there has to be a contract between IT and healthcare technology management to really partner together to find solutions, so there’s a proper handoff.”
The full podcast is available for streaming on the AAMI podcast page. It can also be downloaded from iTunes, TuneIn, and Stitcher.
