Well-attended MD PnP conference seeks safer hospital care

The MD PnP conference drew a large and distinguished audience this week (June 25-27), with more than 135 registered attendees and the nation’s top medical IT official as the keynote speaker.

The event is formally titled the HCMDSS/MD PnP conference. HCMDSS stands for High Confidence Medical Devices, Software and Systems, and MD PnP represents Medical Device Plug-and-Play Interoperability.

The three day event was organized by MD PnP officials, headed by Julian Goldman M.D., an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. CIMIT has been a strong supporter of the Plug ‘n Play program, and is a sponsor of the conference.

A key goal of the event is to discuss methods of making hospital-based health care safer by ensuring that all electrical and digital systems “talk to each other” efficiently during medical procedures. Attendees came from around the U.S. and from several countries.

Opening keynote speaker was Robert Kolodner, MD, national coordinator of health information technology in the federal Department of Health and Human Services.

Dr. Kolodner is a longtime advocate of electronic medical records. He said that devising strategies for including medical devices in the effort to create safer and more efficient hospitals would be a valuable achievement.