May 19-25 – HTMA Week
May 31, Manny’s Meeting, San Diego
June 1-3, AAMI, San Diego
June 6 – Tennessee Biomed Meeting – Jackson, Tennessee
June 7-8 – Indianan Biomedical Mid-Year Meeting – Batesville, IN
July 28-31 AHRA Annual, Minneapolis – will attend if my paper is selected
August – CEAI in Chicago
September 4-6- NCBA (Charlotte)
September 18-20- VBA
October 1-3 – AHRA (Baltimore)
October 16-18, MD Expo, Nashville
October 30 – Nov 3 – FBS
January 18, IBS, Indianapolis
May 7, 2013
Are you preparing your technicians for advancement? How do you manage your techs to ensure each one has a fair shot at promotion or advancement within the field?
If you’ve been in the field for any substantial amount of time, and worked in management positions, you already know there are the rare few who really could care less, or so they say, about upward mobility. They just want to be left alone to do their work “PMing” of infusion pumps, or whatever they have become accustomed to. This seems counterintuitive to most, but hey, we need those types in the field, too. So, after trying to motivate them to advance, we just give them a nice pat on the back and let them do their thing. If someone wants to stay a tech II for 20 years, OK, we need PM busters.
It’s the tech who wants (or feels entitled to) a promotion that we need to focus our energies on. Having served 20 years as a biomed in the U.S. Army, I was ingrained with the idea of preparing your soldiers (aka techs) to take over. Prepare them to advance. Teach them the skills and provide them the tools necessary to progress. Obviously, that carried over with me into civilian life and this is how I approach it with anyone who works under me. The problem is you have 10 biomed tech IIs and only one biomed tech III slot available. The problem could also be that you can promote a certain amount each year without raising eyebrows or busting your budget.
So, how do you decide? Do you pick your buddies or favorites who may drink beer with you after work? Is there a fairer method? Here’s how I decide: During annual appraisals, or counseling sessions, I lay out a concrete, attainable plan, in writing. I will preach that almost every single tech II feels (and claims) that he/she is the best, comes to work on time, and does what is expected of them. Therefore, they should be promoted. Great. That is what we expect of you. Years as a tech II do not entitle you to an automatic promotion.
What I want to see is further personal and professional advancement.
These are a few of the criteria I use to judge whether a tech is prepared and deserving of promotion. I have found it truly makes it very easy to justify why someone is not being promoted and answer an employee who whines about not being promoted: “I have X amount of time as a tech level X.” It’s easy to pull out the evaluation from the previous counseling session and ask, “What have you done toward the plan we laid out the last time this was discussed? Conversation over. Now, let’s work on getting you promoted next year. Here’s the plan.”
Not to mention, it helps you answer the complaint of, “So-and-so got promoted over me.”
Donald Tucker, CBET, MS, MBA, is director of clinical engineering with Christus Health in Irving, TX.
No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.
―Aristotle
I sat there in her living room staring at her through teary eyes. “I feel crazy,” I said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Why do you feel crazy?” she asked.
“Because I’m neurotic and self-conscious and regretful, and so much more all at once,” I said.
“And you don’t think everyone feels like this at times?” she asked.
“Not like this,” I replied under my breath.
“Well you’re wrong,” she said. “If you think you know someone who never feels a bit crazy and off-center, you just don’t know enough about them. Every one of us contains a measure of ‘crazy’ that moves us in strange, often perplexing ways. This side of us is necessary; it’s part of our human ability to think, adapt and grow. It’s part of being intelligent,” she said.
I sat silently for a moment. My eyes gazed from her eyes to the ground and back to her eyes again. “So you’re saying I should want to feel like this?”
“To an extent,” she said. “Let me put it this way: Taking all your feelings seriously all the time is a waste of your spirit. You have to know that sometimes what you feel simply won’t align with what you want; it’s just your subconscious mind’s way of helping you look at things from a different perspective. These feelings will come and go quickly as long as you let them go… as long as you consciously push past them.”
We shared another moment of silence, then my lips curled up slightly and I cracked a smile, “Thank you, Grandma,” I said.
Over the course of the next few hours we discussed the following – some ways we unnecessarily drive ourselves crazy:
As Thich Nhat Hanh so perfectly said, “People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.”
In many cases you stay stuck in your old routines for no other reason than that they are familiar to you. In other words, you’re afraid of change and the unknown. You continually put your dreams and goals off until tomorrow, and you pass on great opportunities simply because they have the potential to lead you out of your comfort zone.
You start using excuses to justify your lack of backbone: “Someday when I have more money,” or “when I’m older,” or the over-abused “I’ll get to it as soon as I have more time.” This is a vicious cycle that leads to a deeply unsatisfying life – a way of thinking that eventually sends you to your grave with immense regret. Regret that you didn’t follow your heart. Regret that you always put everyone else’s needs before your own. Regret that you didn’t do what you could have done when you had the chance.
So how do you prevent regretting all the potential should haves, would haves and could haves?
Simple. Forget the past. Forget what you can’t change. Today is the first day of the rest of your life. From this point on, let there be no excuses, no explanations and no regrets. Start from where you are right now, break free from your cage of comfort and take a bold step forward.
It happens to all of us at some point – suffering from the consequences of love-driven obsession and addiction. Your desire for someone bestows upon you an intoxicating, mind-altering dose of feelings you never dared to admit you wanted. It’s an emotional bender, perhaps, of reckless love and roaring excitement.
When the subject of your desire is even slightly withheld from you, you promptly spiral out of control, feeling crazy and depleted, as if a drug you rely on is being dangled in front of you just out of your reach. And then you become resentful of your dealer – the subject of your desire – who you believe encouraged your addiction in the first place, but now refuses to tender the good stuff you have come to rely on… even though you’re certain they have it, darn it, because they used to give it to you all the time free of charge.
Meanwhile, of course, this person has become more and more appalled by your junkie ways. They look at you no longer as an equal, but as a dependent who relies on them. They don’t see the person they cared for; they see the mess you’ve become. But if you stop and think about it, how can you blame them? Your addictive obsession has devalued your own self-esteem and self-worth; and it’s hard to love and respect those who don’t love and respect themselves. (Angel and I discuss this in more detail in the Relationships and Self-Love chapters of 1,000 Little Things Happy, Successful People Do Differently.)
If you compete with others, you will become bitter. If you compete with a previous version of yourself, you will become better. It’s as simple as that. You are not in competition with anybody except yourself; plan to outdo your past not other people.
Rather than compete against others, work with them on a common goal. Use your combined insights and talents to achieve what none of you can alone. Real personal growth and learning occurs through relationships, when the competitive spirit is replaced with a collaborative one.
Complaining is a draining waste of time. We all have a finite amount of time and energy. Any amount of it you spend whining and complaining is a total loss; do something useful instead.
Take the next 24 hours and every time you start to complain, realize it, admit it and stop it. How often do you complain and harp on negative thoughts? It may be more often than you think. Know that bringing awareness to this unproductive habit is the first step to overcoming it.
Bottom line: You are not allowed to complain about something unless you’re going to do something about it. (Read Think and Grow Rich
What’s the best part of telling the truth? You don’t have to keep track of everything you’ve said. Quite simply, the truth doesn’t cease to exist just because you ignore it. It takes constant care and maintenance to hide reality behind a lie. The truth may be hard to deal with, it may irritate you, but it will always set you free.
In the end someone is going to tell the truth anyway. The only question is: Who do you want to tell it, you or them?
To resist at the beginning is always the easiest choice to make, and it’s also the only choice that guarantees you will never reach the end result you desire.
The thing we all do best to drive ourselves crazy is to do nothing when something needs to get done. The way to counteract this is simple: engage deeply in work that needs to be completed.
Your time is now. There’s no price too great for feeling accomplished. There’s no price too great for feeling alive. And if you don’t do it now, you probably never will. You know the thing you’ve been putting off the longest? That thing you’ve been procrastinating on for the last several weeks? That’s the thing you need to start doing today. That’s the thing you need to start before going to bed tonight.
The time to start is not when the crap hits the fan. The time to start is now. Period.
What you focus on grows stronger in your life. When you focus on a person’s wonderful qualities, you have a wonderful relationship with them. When you focus on a person’s not so wonderful qualities, you have a not so wonderful relationship with them. When you focus on benefits of a situation, you get to take advantage of them. When you focus on the drawbacks, you gain nothing but a frown.
The bottom line is that you see only what you want to see, and what you see determines where you wander in life. Your attitude is a little thing that makes a massive difference. Don’t be one of the crazy ones who makes it a point not to smile. (Read The Happiness Project
Life will never live up to your expectations, unless your expectations are simply to embrace life as it unfolds and make the very best of it. You have to lower your expectations and increase your appreciation to improve your happiness. Know that everything is in impeccable order whether you understand it or not. How you react determines how good it turns out for you.
Something that is really difficult, but totally worth it, is giving up on how you thought it was ‘supposed to be.’ The most beautiful part of this practice is simply returning to the peaceful feeling of being and working with what’s available to you in the moment. This peace is the result of retraining your mind to process life as it is, rather than as you had expected.
So embrace life’s surprises. Smile and realize that it’s far better to be pleasantly surprised than hopelessly disappointed.
What would you add to the list? What’s been making you feel crazy lately? Leave us a comment below and let us know.
Photo by: Alyssa L. Miller
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        Healthcare Business News
Prices for anesthesia units up 14% over past yearBy Jaimy Lee Posted: May 20, 2013 – 3:00 pm ET
The average cost for anesthesia units is 14% higher than it was a year ago, according to the Modern Healthcare/ECRI Institute Technology Price Index.
The TPI index looks at monthly and annual price data for about 30 supply and capital items purchased by hospitals and other healthcare providers, based on three-month rolling averages.
The average cost for a basic anesthesia unit is $45,884, falling in the middle of the expected cost range of $40,000 to $50,000. Unit prices rose 2.8% from February to March. The units are used during surgery to dispense medications and control a patient’s consciousness level.
Though added options such as patient-monitoring systems or different gas monitors can boost the technology’s cost, the overall market for anesthesia workplaces is consistent and has reported few changes, said Michael Argentieri, the ECRI Institute’s vice president of market development. “The mix of products—simple to advanced—has not changed over the last several years,” he added. GE Healthcare and Dräger, based in Lubeck, Germany, remain the two dominant marketers of anesthesia units in the U.S., making up about 94% of the market for the hospitals that supply data to the ECRI Institute. Argentieri noted that there are “no changes expected in pricing of these units.” Follow Jaimy Lee on Twitter: @MHjlee |
Read more: Prices for anesthesia units rise 14% over past year | Modern Healthcare http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20130520/NEWS/305209964#ixzz2Tw0i8kyO
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6 Ways to Improve Relationships by Tackling Self-Consciousness
Posted: 20 May 2013 11:02 AM PDT
When I was growing up, I was a great soccer star, a swimming champion, and a well-read student.
Deep down, though, I was struggling to make more than a few good relationships with other people.
One of the biggest hindrances in my life has been self-consciousness.
Not only did I worry what other people thought about me, but I would intentionally avoid social situations where I would be uncomfortable.
I had no problem with people in general, but in some cases I avoided them like the plague.
Why? I sweat.
A lot.
I sweat so much I have to carry around a little cloth with me. I sweat so much, I sometimes have to wring out that cloth.
While in grade school I asked to be excused from class to avoid square dancing – I never came back to class that day.
It’s a disease called hyperhidrosis, but I always imagined that nobody would understand the scientific aspects so I became incredibly self-conscious.
If I had to shake people’s hand, I would feel strange around them for fear that they were disgusted by me.
Far from a loner, my closest friends were those who knew about my sweaty hands. We rarely talked about it, but they knew.
The relationship I had with those friends was great because I learned to accept myself when I was around them. With most other people, I never accepted my sweating disease.
More importantly, when I felt uncomfortable and disgusted with myself, the emotions were reciprocated by others through a part of the brain known as “mirror neurons”.
The frontal lobe has neurons that signal when you are being touched, but there are also neurons that signal when you see other people being touched. In the same way, when my sweaty hands made me feel noticeably uncomfortable, other people were feeling the same discomfort.
Now, I have grown enough to overcome most of my self-consciousness with sweating. Before anyone else could love me, I realized that I had to love myself. Embracing my situation and myself was the only way that I could be accepted fully by others.
While it is a life-long process when self-consciousness has rooted itself deep in your mind, here are 6 ways that I have been able to tackle self-consciousness:
1.Embrace what you cannot control. Conventional wisdom often tells us that it is good to accept ourselves the way we are. Acceptance is great, but I feel it doesn’t have a strong enough connotation to promote real change with self-consciousness. Don’t just accept what you cannot control, but fully embrace it. It may never be a positive thing, but it is a part of you and embrace how much stronger the adversity has made you become.
If you have other methods to help you love yourself more, practice them as long as you need to in order to remove self-consciousness.
It has dictated my life for many years so it is a slow and steady process, but an absolutely necessary one.
By removing self-consciousness in your life, you will find better relationships with people who are as comfortable with you as you are with yourself.
| Written on 5/20/2013 by Mans Denton. Mans Denton is an entrepreneur and self-improvement nut. His blog, The Hacked Mind, takes a scientific approach to improving life, including dietary, sleep, and meditative practices. He also likes to explore abstract self-improvement methods, such as conquering self-consciousness. |
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9 Powerful Free Infographic Tools To Create Your Own Infographics
A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Infographics
Infographics are everywhere, and we can’t get enough of them!
By presenting information in a compact and creative format, infographics are able to quickly convey knowledge and engage its viewers. Most Infographics are fun to read and provide valuable information.
Important to marketers, submitting unique infographics to the web that have to do with your niche, is one of the best things you can do for online marketing!
Below you will find a set of tools you can use to create your own infographics. Enjoy!
COLLECTION OF FREE INFOGRAPHIC TOOLS AND SOFTWARE
| visual.ly | Piktochart | infogr.am |
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| Create free custom infographics in seconds with Visual.ly Create. | Piktochart helps users create engaging presentations from their data/information. | Create free interactive charts and infographics |
| Hohli Charts | amCharts Visual Editor | Google Chart Tools |
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| Based on the Google Chart API a briljant tool to create great charts the way you like them, it will let you create lines, bar and pie charts, Venn diagrams, radar charts and scatter plots | AmCharts is a set of JavaScript (HTML5) and flash charts for your websites and Web-based products. An ideal tool to generate charts for your interactive infographics. | Provides several tools for making data more comprehensible. Google Chart Tools is the search giant’s bundling of the Google Chart API and Google Visualization API. |
| Wordle | Icon Archive | Pixlr |
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| Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. | Search through more than 297000 free icons. Browse icon sets by category, artist, popularity, date. | Pixlr is a free online photo editor. Edit, adjust and filter your images. No registration jump right in. |
Free tutorials on how to create awesome infographics (Vectortuts+)
After making your first infographic please consider to submit it to The Infographics Archive, the digital library offering links to the worlds best Infographics on the web.
Takeaway: Companies assign inflated job titles for a number of reasons. But there are better reasons for not following that practice.
I’ve written before about how I hate inflated and obscure job titles. But, my personal preference aside, there are ways that an obscure job title can actually hurt you. (And I’m not talking about all those Directors of Inspiration, and other such rot, who may have been clubbed over the head.)
First of all, let’s say I’m a hiring manager looking for a helpdesk worker. I’m working my way through resumes like they’re a stack of Pringles and I come across “Investment development and research analyst” as a job description. Not only is that not going to trigger recognition but I’m not going to take the time to research it.
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Of course, you can’t help what title you are given in a corporation. I recommend just putting in parentheses what the weird title actually translates to. As much as it galls people to hear me say it, your job with a resume is to illustrate a picture of your talents and experience in a manner that is easiest to digest by the hiring manager.
(My title here at TechRepublic is not exactly ideal: Head Blogs Editor. Frankly, to me it sounds like an occupation that requires a hat. But I guess it’s descriptive, on a basic level.)
The other way inflated job titles can hurt is that it can backfire on the company who assigns them. As stated on http://hr.blr.com, any mismatch between the job title and job functions “invites auditors from the state or federal level into your workplace to investigate. The auditors will ask you to hand over all your job descriptions, and they may go through them line by line. If you’ve updated them to match job titles, the auditors will find the holes-the functions that some jobholders can’t perform. And if you change someone’s job title but not his or her job description, you may be sunk.”
The site also warns against title weirdness affecting exempt and non-exempt status: “Give someone a fancy title and you may be tempted to pronounce him or her exempt. Not only do you deprive the person of overtime but you could invite an investigation by the Department of Labor’s Wage & Hour Division. Class action suits for misclassification of workers are at an all-time high and can be very expensive.”
So keep a rein on the fancy schmancy job titles!
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