Medical devices and health IT systems are very different species, each with their own strengths and vulnerabilities. But in an increasingly wired healthcare industry, they're necessarily becoming more and more intertwined.

At the day-long  Clinical Engineering and IT Leadership Symposium on Sunday at HIMSS13, healthcare experts explored the challenges of medical device integration, taking a close and often critical look at issues such as privacy and security, patient safety, human and technological error and regulatory issues.

In his session, David Classen, MD, chief medical informatics officer at Pascal Metrics and associate professor of medicine at the University of Utah, showed how patient safety must be the key driver for smarter device integration.

Classen offered some alarming examples of how complex marriages of technology – smart pumps, patient monitors, EHRs, CPOE systems – can lead to adverse events. But he also spotlighted strategies to link these disparate pieces of software in ways that won't fail the patient.

Safety disasters involving poor device integration are "far more common than we realize," said Classen. In today's "complicated ICU," he said, "we tolerate a lot of unreliability in healthcare that other industries would not."

No question, suboptimal technology is dangerous. "A technology failure, when you have a highly IT-rich environment, changes the safety net," he said.

But the human factor is critical, too. Consider the packaging mistake that led to the wrong medication being dispensed, even though the barcoder said it was OK.

Opportunities for error abound. A system update that disables critical safety checks may go unnoticed. A well-intentioned nurse may try to override a badly designed infusion pump to get the correct dose. 

Add to this the fact that implementation strategies vary wildly from hospitals to hospital. If the airline industry approached technology like this, "we'd be seeing crashes all over the country," said Classen.

No question, device integration, especially in the ICU, is "really complicated," he added. "We were naive to think it could be solved so quickly." 

But by taking a "sociotechnical approach" to integration at the hospital level, and pursuing smarter regulation of devices and health IT at the federal level, we're on a path to a more unified – and safer – hospital environment.

"We have a lot to do to improve patient safety," said Classen. "And health IT needs to be a big part of that."