By K. Richard Douglas
The largest city in Kentucky is Louisville, home to the Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory.
It is also a place to view the craftsmanship of a bygone era at the Conrad-Caldwell House Museum. And, perhaps the city’s most notable landmark is historic Churchill Downs – the home of the fabled Kentucky Derby.
For a large city, health care availability is a necessity and one provider took on that challenge beginning 130 years ago. It was originally the goal of a group of women known as the Home Mission Society of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church that set out to build a hospital in Louisville.
In the intervening years, other hospitals were opened and they eventually all became the Norton Healthcare System.
Today, the health care system serves patients throughout Kentucky and Southern Indiana via five large hospitals, 13 Norton Immediate Care Centers and 190 physician’s practice locations.
All thanks to those women from the Episcopal Church with contributions from the Presbyterian church, the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ and the Roman Catholic Church to create the Norton system.
Today, hospitals include Norton Audubon Hospital, Norton Brownsboro Hospital, Norton Children’s Hospital, Norton Hospital and Norton Women’s and Children’s Hospital. There is also the Norton Children’s Medical Center.
The 10-member imaging team is a part of the larger 44-member clinical engineering department servicing approximately 45,000 pieces of equipment.
“The imaging team is freestanding in the fact there are two directors, myself and Neil Feldmeier (biomed) that report to Scott Skinner, our system director of clinical engineering,” says Doug Elmore, director of imaging services.
The group supports CT, MRI, linear accelerators, ultrasound, nuclear medicine, imaging, radiology, radiology oncology devices and none of the devices are on full-service contracts.
Is there any equipment the group does not support?
“Not at this time. Occasionally the organization will purchase a one-off device, in that case training is not prudent or financially sound to train in such cases,” Elmore says.
The imaging team takes care of five hospitals and one medical center with approximately 1,800 beds. They are responsible for multiple pieces of equipment, including CTs, MRIs and RAD rooms. This does include physician practices.
They also provide service to several R/F rooms, cardiac cath labs, special procedure labs, linear accelerators and 65 physician practices, including 32 that are offsite.
Training comes by way of factory training at the OEM.
“We found that the OEMs typically don’t recognize third-party training and will not supply service keys. We have a very robust training budget,” Elmore says.
In addition to imaging service and support, the team is very involved throughout the acquisition stage.
“We are involved in all contract negotiations and source our parts,” Elmore says.
He says that the group has, and will utilize, third-party labor during vacation season or if he has multiple team members out for training.
“My team is fully trained on all modalities with few exceptions. We have a couple of legacy nuclear cameras that we’ll take a first look and utilize OEM or third-party if necessary,” Elmore says.
“In our physician practices, we’ll occasionally leverage a local third-party group if there is a need in the hospitals,” he adds.
Securing the Network
The imaging team has been involved in a system-wide networking project with the help of an in-house specialist.
“Currently, we are upgrading our wired and wireless network across the system; all imaging devices are moved (network configuration) almost simultaneously in each facility. This commands a tremendous amount of coordination,” says Elmore.
“Fortunately, we were able to create a new position approximately two years ago – medical device security specialist – that also acts as a liaison between CE and IT,” he adds.
The imaging team has proven themselves to be proficient at problem solving, along with their IT colleagues, to head off possible trouble.
“The CE imaging team, along with our medical device security specialist and IT security team, routinely partner on security initiatives,” Elmore says.
Away from work, team members contribute to the imaging community, and the larger HTM community, in a number of ways.
“Key team members are AAMI members and multiple persons are CBET certified and three are CHTM certified. Everyone in CE is a member of the Kentucky Association for Medical Instrumentation (KAMI),” Elmore says. This includes the imaging team.
“The CE executive is board-certified as a Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives and is a Certified Materials and Resource Professional (CMRP). Conferences attended by various persons annually include AAMI, ACHE, RSNA, Archimedes Medical Device Security and HIMSS,” Elmore adds.
In a city that has helped produce a lot of home runs, the dedicated imaging team at Norton Healthcare is hitting it out of the park every day.
