Guest Blog Entry: What I learned at ASET 2015

I am honored to post this blog entry, authored by Richard Vogel, Ph.D., DABNM who gave a presentation for the ASET 2015 Annual Conference Advanced IONM Course on August 1st.

Many thanks to Dr. Vogel for sharing his blog, and if you would like to read more from Dr. Vogel, please visit  http://neurologiclabs.com/.

August 2, 2015 at 18:19  •  Posted in Professionalism by Richard Vogel  • 

The Neurodiagnostic Society (ASET) is the largest national professional association for individuals involved in the study and recording of electrical activity in the brain and nervous system. The ASET 2015 annual meeting was held in Weston, Florida this past weekend, and I was privileged to be an invited speaker. In addition to me, IONM faculty included:

    Mark Stecker, MD, PhD

    Jeff Balzer, PhD, DABNM, FASNM

    Bryan Wilent, PhD, DABNM

    Mark Helderman, R.EEG/EP T., CNIM

    Rebecca Clark-Bash, R. EEG/EP T., CNIM, CLTM, FASNM

    Bernie Cohen, PhD, FACNS, FASNM

    Brett Netherton, MS, CNIM, FASN

    Stuart Hoffman, DO

    Ashley Kotrady, BS, CNIM

    Adam Doan, DC, DABNM

The first thing that I learned at the meeting is that the ASET annual meeting is a really, really good meeting. I think it is a must-attend event for anyone working in neurodiagnostics. I’ve been in the field for quite a few years now, and I just joined ASET last year…and I’ve never attended one of their meetings before. I have to say that it was one of the best meetings that I’ve ever attended. The people were so nice. The talks were fantastic! The scope of the talks ranged from beginner to advanced, so that everyone can benefit from the content. Obviously, I focused my attendance on the topic of neuromonitoring (IONM).
The second thing that I learned at the meeting (in talking to lots of people) is that there are quite a few technologists working in neurodiagnostics who are actually against technologist licensure because they think it will abolish the certifications that they’ve worked so hard to achieve. This is absolutely false, and I would encourage active members of the society to get the word out to clear up any confusion. I am a strong advocate for technologist licensure, and I support their ongoing endeavors to achieve licensure.
The third thing that I learned in listening to Dr. Cohen’s talk (which was a joint presentation with Brett Netherton), is that there are a lot of people out there working as technologists who are uncomfortable being called a “neurophysiologist”. Also, there are quite a few neurophysiologists out there who are uncomfortable being called a “technologist”. There are lots of different opinions about what job title one should have. I’m sure there will be more discussions on this topic.

The final thing that I learned at the meeting is that many people in neurodiagnostics feel that their employers don’t provide enough support for continuing education. I’m not just talking about financial support to attend conferences, but also time off to attend conferences and money to purchase books, etc. Some employers don’t see any benefit in continuing education. On more than one occasion I heard someone say that their company only cares about the bottom line ($). Some people had to foot the entire bill of traveling to the conference themselves! I think that’s really unfortunate. I met so many people who were just ecstatic about their opportunity to be at the conference and learn new information. The excitement for learning was palpable and contagious! That’s so refreshing!
I decided not to write about the content of the ASET talks/courses because I thought readers would be interested to hear some of the “other” topics that came up in conversation.
I’ve written previously about reasons to join a professional society. If you are not a member of a professional society, I strongly encourage you to join one.

Preventing Skin Breakdown and Electrode-related injuries: the topic of the ASET 2015 Symposium at our annual conference

                                             Can we prevent this??

Over the years I have received countless phone calls and e-mails from technologists, lab managers, nurses and physicians who have observed skin breakdown at electrode sites.  One can’t deny that this has become a hot topic nationwide!  Several hospitals have initiated their own research into the nature of these injuries.  We all have a common goal to reduce the chance of skin breakdown.  One of our major challenges is to determine what factors contribute to skin breakdown.  Since every lab and every technologist utilize unique methods and combinations of products for skin prep, adhesive and conductive gels, it is very difficult to come up with a precise answer to this question.

For the first time ever, we are going to film and live stream an ASET event so that technologists at home can hear the symposium and participate in the discussion via a chat room!  Please use this link to read more on how to participate: 

https://livestream.com/GlobalMedia/ASET2015 

I am confident that the four panelists who will be presenting at this symposium will provide some insights and that the audience will also participate in discussion to help us determine "best practices" to prevent skin breakdown.  Our first panelist is a wound care nurse from Children’s Hospital of Colorado, Carol Price.   She has been a part of a team providing assessment and treatment of patients with this problem.  One of the problems we have as technologists is that we are not well informed about how the skin is structured,  how it is compromised and what conditions increase the risk for skin breakdown.  Carol’s presentation will help us understand the skin and injuries to the skin.  She will explain the assessment scale that helps categorize the severity of injuries. 

Other panelists include members of the ASET skin integrity task force who will explain what we have discovered so far, and how you can help!  One of the task force members works with pediatric and neonatal patients and she will provide an overview of what is unique about this patient population in reference to electrode related injuries.  We also will hear from Brett Netherton,  our expert on electrode injuries that occur in the O.R. during monitoring. 

If you are coming to this year’s ASET annual conference please don’t miss this event!  And if you can’t be there, please sign up to participate!  It is free!  We cannot offer ASET CEUs for this event, in part because we have never tried to do a live streaming session before and we want to make sure it all works  well.  Because it requires a significant amount of administrative time to document participation for the purpose of tracking CEUs, if we are able to offer another live streaming event in the future, we would include a nominal charge for the event to cover the cost of awarding CEUs.  We plan to make the recorded event available at some point after the conference, so please watch our website for more details.

But for now, please consider participating if you are concerned about skin breakdown.  Our current website survey is about this topic and 70% of respondents report a concern about this!

Neurodiagnostic Technologist Workforce Shortage – Working on a solution to the problem

It has been way too long since I posted a blog entry!  As you might imagine, with the ASET annual conference coming up next month, I have been very busy with all of the details of planning this meeting!  I will be posting more on the exciting program we’ll be offering but for now, I want to tell you about the roundtable discussion hosted by ABRET which I attended two weeks ago, in Chicago.

ABRET convened a group of twenty neurodiagnostic technologists from around the country, including representatives of ABRET and ASET and regional representatives, for a two-day brain-storming session.  Our professional facilitator, Mickie Rops, has worked with both ASET and ABRET before, so she was very familiar with our profession, our representatives and our challenges.

The goal of this roundtable discussion was to focus on ways to alleviate the shortage of qualified neurodiagnostic technologists, and to figure out how to best support and grow formal education in this field. 

Our first task was to determine the factors that have contributed to the shortage of neurodiagnostic technologists, and once we agreed upon those factors, we divided up into three small groups to come up with ideas for actions to address each of those factors.

So, what did we decide?

Here is the list of factors that may be keeping the field from growing:

• Little/no awareness of the NDT field (by HR, patients, inter-departmental, job seekers)

• NDT role undervalued by others (institutional management)

• NDT role / registry undervalued by ourselves / individuals losing jobs because they are not credentialed

• Lack of standardized job descriptions and salary structure (models exist but are not widely adopted)

• Generational divide (different perspectives/expectations)

• Losing qualified workforce through retirements

• Educational pathway to NDT is not clearly defined

• Lack of clinical sites / lack of schools to meet need

• Program attrition / retention of students

This seems like a lengthy list of problems to be addressed.  But our dynamic group worked collaboratively to take a proactive approach and improve conditions in our profession.

Some ideas:

To Improve Awareness of Neurodiagnostic Technology as a profession:

Develop an administrators’ educational packet

Develop a public service announcement

Encourage technologists to work within their hospitals on committees, patient advocate programs, etc.

To address the loss of technologists through retirement:

Publish tips for creating flexible shifts, job sharing, teaching for managers

To create more clinical sites:
Market the value of being a clinical site to decision makers

•             Sharpen skills of current staff

•             Increased patient satisfaction

•             Decreased recruitment costs and interview costs

•             Decrease problems with untrained staff

That is a lot of work to do!  ASET’s Board of Trustees will be participating in a strategic planning session at the upcoming Board meeting during our annual conference.  Many of the recommended actions can be incorporated into this plan with specific actions to address the workforce shortage.

Meanwhile, please think about what you can do!  And please consider helping to grow the profession by serving as a clinical site!  Or become an ASET ambassador and do a presentation about the field at your local school or job fair!

ASET Spring Seminar in Hartford, CT: and Neurodiagnostic Education future seminar sites

                                       Faye, Christine Scott, Margaret Barlow, Scott Blodgett

The ASET Spring Seminar took place on April 18^th & 19^th, on the campus of Hartford Hospital.  We had the biggest turn-out  ever with 99 attendees registered to attend!  This was a real surprise to us since many of the registrations came in at the last minute!  But we welcomed all and it was very successful!

We ran two courses concurrently:  EEG Boot Camp and LTME Academy.  We received many positive comments for both courses, thanks to the expert faculty who took time out of their busy weekend to present lectures and workshops!  The setting was perfect:  a conference center on the hospital campus, and the hotel we used was a block away from the Amtrak train station, so it was very convenient for our NYC attendees to commute to the meeting.

                                 ASET staff:  Faye McNall && Maureen Carroll at registration desk

I thought you might find it interesting and informative to learn more about our “local host” program and why we are booking our spring and fall courses this way.  In years past, we used hotel meeting space to hold our two-day seminar courses.  Although it was most convenient for our course participants to stay in a hotel room and walk down to the meeting rooms in the morning, the fees charged by the hotel for this service were getting outrageous and all we could do was increase the registration fee to cover expenses.  Some examples:  one gallon of coffee:  $80 dollars.  Continental breakfast (pastry, juice and coffee)  $24 per person.  Sandwich lunch:  $35 per person!  Bottles of water and soda at breaks:  $3.50 per person.  Hotels also charge for meeting space and then there also AV rental fees:  each item has a separate rental fee, from the screen to the projector cart, to the cables to connect everything, plus a labor charge per hour.  So, an additional $500 per room for audio-visual equipment would be a low estimate.

I really wanted to make it affordable for technologists to come to our educational meetings.  So, I decided to try using free meeting space such as hospital conference centers and college classrooms.  And it was very successful!  I discovered that most hospital and college classrooms have audio-visual equipment hard-wired to a computer so, no need to worry about AV set-ups or shipping our projectors to a meeting site only to find that they had been damaged in transit!  And hospital kitchen catering services and local vendors offered full meals at reasonable rates!  A breakfast is typically $10 per person and a lunch $15 per person.   We have been able to lower the registration fees by $100 since we moved away from hotel meeting space.

So, if you are thinking about serving as a local host for an ASET event in the future, here are the primary features that we need:

•      Adequate meeting space:  two rooms seating 50-60 people

•     Must have a nearby hotel that offers free shuttle service for our attendees to get to and from the meeting site both days

•       Must be in a city that has easy access to an airport with good connections around the country

•       A person willing to be my local host coordinator, to do everything from helping me find speakers to storing our boxes of supplies until we show up to set-up meeting registration, to helping find the right catering service and hotel.

We book two seminars each year:  spring and fall.  We will be seeking our 2016 seminar locations in the next few months.  So if you are interested in taking on a project like this, please contact me directly at faye@aset.org and we’ll talk about it!

FYI: Our 2015 Fall Seminar courses will take place at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.  We will offer the two-day EEG Boot Camp course and a 1 day MEG course.  We’ll be in a great setting with lots of expert faculty to give lectures!  See you there!