Forbes Technology Council: Want A Smarter Hospital? Elevate Clinical Engineering With Better Data

Want A Smarter Hospital? Elevate Clinical Engineering With Better Data

Founder & CEO of CalmWave, Ophir Ronen is a 25-year Enterprise IT veteran, merging AI with healthcare to improve hospital operations.

If hospital IT professionals are the unsung heroes of the healthcare system, as I argued in a previous Forbes article, clinical engineers are even more overlooked.

You rarely hear about them, but clinical engineers are responsible for ensuring that the machines on which modern medicine relies run safely, accurately and efficiently. Their job isn’t glamorous: fixing broken monitors, repairing infusion pumps, replacing cables and servicing devices critical to human life. They’re the frontline for hardware that matters most. But unlike in IT, where a malfunction might mean a productivity loss, a failure in clinical engineering could mean the difference between life and death.

Clinical engineering teams maintain key hospital infrastructure, ensuring these critical systems function correctly and reliably. Yet for all their indispensable contributions, these teams are chronically understaffed, underpaid and tragically overlooked. The irony is stark: They are tasked with keeping lifesaving equipment operational, but too often do their jobs without the resources they need to be effective, forced to react to crises as they emerge and called only when something breaks or complaints pile up. In some hospitals, temporary technicians are brought in only after service quality reaches a tipping point.

Clinical engineers are responsible for managing the safety and reliability of this critical equipment, but in many hospitals, they simply don’t have access to relevant data in real time – or at all. Alerts often don’t show up in centralized systems. There is no audit trail, no dashboard, no way to prioritize which rooms are having repeated cable disconnects or speaker failures. And so the problem becomes cyclical: Nurses ignore the alarms because they can’t address the root cause, and the clinical engineering teams never see the signals in the first place.

This isn’t simply a staffing issue—it’s fundamentally an operations visibility problem. Clinical engineers can’t proactively solve what they don’t know.

An Alarming Issue

To understand the scale of the problem, consider the experience of an average critical care unit in an American hospital. A staggering number of the hundreds of thousands of alarms the unit experiences every month—more than half—are likely not patient-related at all, but rather technical alarms: broken cables, malfunctioning speaker systems, burnt-out indicator lamps and other medical hardware issues.

As is the norm, this unit’s staff likely aren’t tracking these alarms, which are recorded by bedside monitors but not surfaced to the right people. For nurses, these alarms are just more noise, background clutter in an already overstimulating environment. For clinical engineers, however, they represent a potentially troubling blind spot. How do you maintain lifesaving equipment when you don’t know it’s failing?

This situation isn’t unique. Too many hospitals expect clinical engineers to maintain fleets of complex, critical equipment without a clear view of performance metrics, failure rates or even device status. Often, the only feedback loop they get is through clinician complaints—or worse, after a failure has affected patient care. This reactive model makes their job nearly impossible and, in turn, leads to negative outcomes for both patients and clinicians.

To be clear, this is not a failure of individuals but a failure of systems. Most hospitals haven’t invested in the digital infrastructure that clinical engineers need to operate proactively. Asset tracking is often manual. Alarm data is fragmented or inaccessible. Preventive maintenance relies on guesswork or outdated norms.

Clinical Engineering As Operational Infrastructure

Hospitals don’t merely need more staff or standalone tech solutions; they require a mindset shift and proper tooling. Clinical engineering is core operational infrastructure, on par with network operations centers or IT service desks in other industries. In enterprise environments where uptime matters, running complex systems without robust performance metrics, predictive analytics and failure monitoring would be unthinkable. Healthcare must adopt this same mindset.

As our work with clinical engineering teams shows, that future is now. With access to integrated technical alarm data, for example, clinical engineering teams can prioritize issues by urgency or frequency, reducing noise and improving response times. They can identify systemic failures, like firmware bugs or widespread cable degradation, and plan maintenance windows proactively to reduce disruption and avoid unnecessary device downtime. Finally, they can forecast failures based on historical data and usage patterns, improving budget allocation and staffing models.

In my experience, in some hospital units, a single class of device alarm type (like, say, indicator lamp failures) can account for more than 60% of all technical alerts. Without centralized visibility, this remains invisible system-wide. With it, teams can fix what matters most—fast.

First Responders For The Machines

Clinical engineers are the first responders for medical equipment. They diagnose, treat and prevent technical issues in devices essential to patient recovery. Their work directly influences clinical efficiency, patient outcomes and the ultimate goal of healthcare: patient improvement. Hospitals must shift from focusing solely on patient degradation to actively facilitating patient improvement, empowering clinicians to help patients recover and be discharged sooner.

If you work in hospital leadership, ask yourself: Do I understand our technical alarm load? Do I know precisely how our devices perform, where they are and what their status is right now? Without visibility, hidden operational risks multiply.

While hospitals eagerly embrace digital transformation, from electronic medical records to AI-assisted diagnostics, the digital backbone supporting medical devices remains neglected. It’s time to bring clinical engineering into the conversation as an essential contributor to hospital performance.

In healthcare, every second counts. Clinical engineers, who ensure that medical devices operate safely and reliably, are indispensable to care delivery. It’s time hospital leaders recognize and support them accordingly.

This post originally appeared in Forbes 9/4/25