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Health by design |
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Jobboom Publishing |
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PATIENT CARE COMES FIRST
One engineer who’s successfully created a career in the field is Yves Amyot. Amyot holds an undergraduate degree in engineering physics from the École Polytechnique, a master’s in clinical and biomedical engineering from the University of British Columbia, and a master’s in health administration from the Université de Montréal. His ability to combine technical skills with patient care has led the Montréal Heart Institute (MHI) to create a new position for him. He’s now in charge of biomedical engineering, telecommunications and information services.Putting patient care first means that engineers sometimes deal with crises differently than they might if they were concerned with technical issues alone. Amyot cites his response to the Heart Institute’s PACS system failure late in 2004. His team had been planning to migrate data into a new environment that would enable secure, redundant access to the main imaging archive, but they hadn’t yet. For a week, no diagnostic images could be retrieved. The data wasn’t lost, but they knew delays could interfere with patient care.
Amyot focused on retrieving the most recent images first, so that patients who needed surgery would know right away. “Our role was to push vendors to stay until midnight if necessary,” he says. “We needed to get the situation resolved quickly.”
It took two weeks to bring the system back online, and Amyot still remembers the scare. As MHI becomes an increasingly paperless environment, he plans to make sure nothing similar happens again. “We need to have a system where we can have a fully redundant PACS backup.”
Patients who rely on the equipment that biomedical engineers design and maintain definitely appreciate Amyot’s dedication to making sure it works as it should — as does the institution he serves. In Amyot’s own words: “Future bioengineers need to understand that they’ll work in a world where they’ll need clinical understanding.”
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