BMET and Clinical Engineer: Healthcare Worker

I don't need to tell you that today, everything is a business. My career in healthcare was no exception, and that is why oversight, and understanding what is behind that process, is more important than ever. Hospital environments, including risk management, are multifaceted and fraught with pitfalls: anyone involved in healthcare and saying otherwise is not paying attention.

I worked in several New York City hospitals for over 30 years; I have an intuitive sense of what that environment is like. One way to judge a hospital is to look at hospitals' outcomes - infection rates, accidents, deaths, readmissions - and extrapolate from those a sense of their overall design and functions. Another way is to look more closely at how well their assessments of risks matches their outcomes: high infection rates indicate risky behavior somewhere in the system, indicating a need to assess risks. What systems are in place for the hospital to clearly evaluate and remedy poor outcomes?