There may be a shortage of well-rounded, jack-of-all-trade type clinical engineers in coming years, according to speakers at a roundtable discussion held at the 2011 Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) conference & expo on June 26.

SAN ANTONIOClinical engineers (CE) often get too bogged down in the break/fix activities on a daily basis. If this consumes the life of the CE, then there will not be an opportunity to grow. We need to take control of what our profession will become 10 to 15 years down the line because its already in a state of evolution, said Alan Gresch, who made a presentation at the 2011 Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation annual meeting on June 25.

SAN ANTONIOThe future of healthcare may include mobile emergency hospitals with CTs, operating rooms and clinical labs that can communicate with globally available EMRs, predicted James P. Keller, Jr., vice president health technology evaluation and safety at the ECRI Institute. After initial treatment, he said, providers may one day access real-time data from the patients home bedside using telemedicine.

Google is dicontinuing its Google Health personal health record (PHR) service effective Jan. 1, 2012. Data will remain available for download through Jan. 1, 2013, said Aaron Brown, senior product manager of Google Health, in a blog posted June 24.

As we conducted our second annual CMIO Health IT Top Trends Survey, we welcomed a second round of findings to layer onto last years inaugural results.

BOSTON Health leaders from across the U.S. gathered together at the CMIO Summit Clinical IT Leadership Forum on June 10 to hear and converse with colleagues who have navigated the straits of meaningful use, wrestled health information exchange (HIE) and clinical information systemsand lived to tell the tale of success.

Advanced clinical decision support (CDS) systems prioritize drug interactions, reducing both patient complications and physician time at the computer. And once providers get past the myriad alerts, theyre finding new frontiers for CDS.

Positive change hinges on managing data and managing relationships with stakeholders. It is no coincidence that those two key qualities are essentially a job description for a CMIO.