The management perspective of medical instrumentation

With the health care environment growing increasingly stringent, hospitals are closely scrutinizing decisions regarding acquisition of medical technology. During this process, physicians and nurses should be involved with hospital management in an orderly, equitable decisionmaking process. Hospital resources should be allocated to those items of medical instrumentation that improve patient care and that can be cost justified. Therefore, hospital management must receive from physicians, nurses, and other medical technology users information concerning such factors as installation requirements and cost, projected utilization, and estimated useful life. Management also looks to physicians and nurses to ensure that mechanisms exist for approving the introduction of new medical instrumentation, training users, and ensuring that privileges are consistent with training. Careful planning, incorporating as much quantifiable data as possible, can benefit all concerned by enabling the hospital team to acquire the most useful medical instrumentation for its money.