Make HTM Great Again—the S.C.-based not-for-profit launched on September 7—has secured the services of biomedical veteran Leah Lough. Lough, who previously served as vice president of AAMI, will join Make HTM Great Again Founder Patrick Lynch on his call with the American Society for Healthcare Engineering (ASHE) next week. (The call was previously slated to take place on September 18.)
“Lough’s 12 years of experience with AAMI, spanning the reign of several executive directors, will surely be a boon to our efforts to organize into a sleek, valuable national presence,” Lynch says.
Moreover, Lynch, CBET, CCE, CHTM, CPHIMS, FACCE, is leading the campaign to form a national HTM organization that can provide lobbying and unwavering support for the HTM community. The initiative was formed after general agreement that the charters and missions of AAMI and the ACCE do not fully support the type of organization that is needed.
All HTM associations and biomeds are encouraged to visit www.MakeHTMGreatAgain.wildapricot.org and review the bylaws, read about membership benefits, and join. Moreover, the website now includes a forum, where members (even free members) can post comments, ask questions, and respond to each other’s questions/comments.
“It should be a great place to collect the thoughts of the HTM community,” Lynch says.
If there’s a quality in a piece of writing that I like, it’s saying something deliberately provocative. The theme of this article ranks in my Top 10. I can no more ignore it than a cat can ignore a mouse.
I thought just renaming the field to HTM was going to fix the existential problems that faced The Profession Formerly Known as Clinical Engineering. Perhaps I missed something?
An awful lot of energy went into that earlier naming decision, and I know I’m not the only person who was turned off by it.
But that was NOTHING compared to this. I hope to God that the purpose of raising up the slogan “Make HTM Great Again” was done solely to elicit a visceral response that gets the field talking about its future. If this doesn’t do it, nothing will.
Setting aside the unfathomable decision to leverage a political slogan that served to split the nation in two, I’m not sold on saying the present sucks in comparison with the good old days serves as a foundation for a viable strategy with which to envision and realize the future. Coal, anyone? Lead leakage and isolation measurements?
But that’s just me. At almost 63, my professional future is behind me, and I prefer to leave the visioning to much younger colleagues. I literally can’t see what they can; their eyes bring fresher perspectives unencumbered by the past, including what was and wasn’t all that great about it, not to mention was has been filtered out or forgotten.
They’re the ones who need to speak to what the future is to be, not a bunch of old timers with more letters after their names than in their names themselves. They’re the ones who will still have skin in the game when decisions made now over professional direction play out in the not too distant future.
Whats in a name? sometimes everything sometimes nothing. at this critical juncture for HTM, lets not loose sight of the overall objective. There is no doubt that there is great potential and great need for our nations HTM departments and societies to have a unified voice and vision. Because we truly could be and should be “stronger together”.
A great slogan to rally our nations Biomedical societies to affiliate under a national organization might be:
“HTM, we can be stronger together”
#HTMstrongertogether
for those of us who driven by data.
“HTM – finding strength in numbers”.
And, a more light hearted slogan, “HTM is awesome!, everything is better when we’re part of a team”
I do know that as a Biomed I have said the wrong thing, the wrong way,or at the wrong time, and had a hard fall. But I picked myself up, corrected myself, and kept on taking care of my caregivers. I think, HTM needs to find “the right stuff” to “live long and prosper” I think the slogan thing can get worked out and the effort can move forward. IMHO HTM does need the organization Pat Lynch speaks of. consider this:
You don’t need to predict the future. Just choose a future — a good future, a useful future — and make the kind of prediction that will alter human emotions and reactions in such a way that the future you predicted will be brought about. Better to make a good future than predict a bad one.
– ISAAC ASIMOV
Kudos to Pat Lynch for getting the ball rolling…