“The need for technology within the health care process has become an essential element. The amount of technology that we have in our hospitals today leads to the need for overall management. The presence of professionals who have specific skills, which however simultaneously become increasingly multidisciplinary and multidimensional, is essential to manage a technology which in reality is no longer a single element that interacts with the patient and the clinician for a finite time, but is an element which, starting from an interaction with the patient, in a finite moment, extends, expands to an entire context because it shares data, information, elements necessary for the treatment process which, perhaps, are not used in that specific moment instant. And therefore the profession changes because it is no longer vertical, but in being vertical it also becomes transversal”. Thus Umberto Nocco, president of the Italian Association of Clinical Engineers, spoke to Adnkronos Salute, speaking in Rome during the 24th AIIC Conference.
“In healthcare there are many expectations from technology – observes Nocco – When we talk about technology, we always tend to see innovation, the new, revolutionary thing. Healthcare is still made up of technologies and devices that are used in everyday life and, in fact, today we have some critical issues regarding these because the level of technological updating is brutally linked to an aspect of chronological age. But updating is one of the first elements in which we must invest in the short term and the investment will certainly be significant also from a monetary point of view, taking into account that, certainly, the moment of technology replacement is a moment in which to rethink the processes, based on what new technology makes available today. “It is an extremely dynamic mechanism, a process of modification, precisely because of this overall continuity.”
The sustainability of innovation also needs to be rethought. “We often stop at the purely economic aspect – underlines the AIIC president – because it is probably the most understandable to everyone, but there are many drivers that control innovation and therefore it is clear that sustainability” is not only economic, but also “of process, because every new technology involves changes to the processes which mean changing the way of working, perhaps having more human resources or changing their way of working, and therefore training. The driver of technological innovation – concludes Nocco – is multidisciplinary”.
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