An Objective Program for the Evaluation of Medical Equipment for Updates and Maintenance (original) (raw)

ASSESSMENT OF MEDICAL EQUIPMENT IN RESPECT TO THEIR DOWN TIME

— The assessment of medical equipment condition has become an issue of increasing concern within healthcare services over the recent years. Most of the used tools to assess medical equipment condition ignore the effect of equipment Down Time (DT) as major factors in determining medical equipment status. This manuscript describes the use of equipment DT over the assessment process, factors that impact equipment DT , auto measurement of equipment Up Time and DT, the assessment criteria, and the assessment of medical equipment condition (MEC) in respect to their DT. The assessment process was implemented for 27653 medical equipment in 30 hospitals, 732 health centers at the Jordanian Ministry of Health (MOH). Along with the use of others assessment factors, the assessment of MEC in respect to their DT provided a significant improvement to the assessment, planning, and replacement processes of medical equipment at the Jordanian Ministry of Health during the last three years. Keywords— Down Time (DT), Up Time (A), Medical Equipment Condition (MEC), Ministry of Health (MOH), Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS).

A Modern Approach for Maintenance Prioritization of Medical Equipment

Operations Management - Emerging Trend in the Digital Era [Working Title], 2020

Maintenance is a crucial topic in the life cycle management of medical equipment. Evidence-based maintenance consists of continuous monitoring of equipment performance, starting from evidence—the current state from the point of view of fault history—and improving its efficiency through the necessary modifications. This process is very important for optimizing the use and allocation of the resources available by the clinical engineering departments. Maintenance of medical equipment consists of two basic activities: scheduled maintenance and corrective maintenance. The purpose of this chapter is to present document-based methods to evaluate every aspect of the medical equipment maintenance process and to provide a correct, objective and standardized approach that supports clinical engineering activities. Following the analysis, the results show that the combination of the use of the two methods provides an overview, in a periodic manner, of maintenance performance that indicates the u...

Maintenance and Modelling Strategies of Biomedical Equipment's in Hospitals: A Review

This article analyzes recent developments in the derivation of bio-medical equipment's maintenance management strategies, and proposes chary points to consider and affeer to perform during their operation. Medical technology is by now an integral part of health care according to consisting general accepted standards. Purchase and operation thereby represent an important economic position and both are subject of everyday optimization attempts. For this purpose by now exists a huge number of tools which conduce more likely to a complexness of the problem by a comprehensive implementation. In the future, we envision that new paradigms will be structured to overcome the present strategies, and in the longer term, provide an alternative source for maintenance and management of medical devices at hospitals. 1. Introduction In a modern hospital, most diagnostic, therapeutic, and rehabilitation activity is based on the extensive use of medical technologies. The management tools to make strategic decisions depend on the quality of information. One of the equipment manager's most critical duties is determining whether to repair or replace a piece of equipment [1]. Hospital is an integral part of a social and medical organization, the function of which is to provide for the population complete health care, both curative and preventive; the hospital is also a center for the training of health workers and bio-social research (World Health Organization). Hospital is much more complex than other manufacturing organizations, for it undertakes medical and health responsibilities that deal with the lives of people, and it must also account for health economics which is different from economic production in important respects [2].The documentation of equipment maintenance and risk ranking is an extremely important duty relating to these activities [3], [4]. A good maintenance system is required for almost all equipment in order to guarantee its performance, prevent failures and to extend its life expectancy [5]. Medical devices maintenance is an integral aspect of an efficient health system. Preventive maintenance policies have been studied for decades. These policies consider the timing of two types of maintenances: preventive maintenance and corrective maintenances. Corrective maintenance is more costly and time intensive than preventive maintenance, but only occurs when a machine fails. A good preventive maintenance policy considers the trade-offs between more frequent preventive maintenances and the more expensive corrective maintenances [6]. On the one hand, the importance of medical equipment, effective management of such equipment, and advances of this technology in prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases is evident. Without medical equipment, diagnosis and treatment will be done at very basic, insufficient levels. On the other hand, for years extortionate costs have been paid for procurement and maintenance of hospital equipment in the health and medical centers of India and the equipment has been largely supplied by foreign countries. This certainly has had negative consequences for the country and necessitates attention, care, maintenance, and proper use of hospital equipment. Moreover, incorrect use of medical equipment leads to detrimental consequences for the safety and health of the patient, and malfunctioning equipment due to inappropriate maintenance can affect the health of patients and the performance of hospitals. The breakdown of medical equipment in service is of particular concern because of its possible use in critical conditions. The signs of equipment failure may not always be apparent to the clinical staff. Therefore scheduled inspections help ensure the safety and efficacy of the medical equipment [7]. Time series forecasting is an important area of forecasting in which past observations of the same variable are collected and analyzed to develop a model describing the underlying relationship. The model is then used to extrapolate the time series into the future, with a promising application in the area of maintenance of medical equipment.

Medical equipment classification according to corrective maintenance data: a strategy based on the equipment age

Revista Brasileira de Engenharia Biomédica, 2014

Introduction: Decision-making on medical equipment management is a daily task for clinical engineers, but it may prove difficult to easily extract relevant information from the large amount of data from computerized maintenance management systems. This article describes a simple method of medical equipment classification based on corrective maintenance indicators. Methods: Three indicators were calculated based on the number of events, duration and cost of corrective maintenance. Three classes were defined according to the indicator values of different equipment ages: class A for 0-4 years, class B for 5-9 years, and class C for equipment older than 10 years. The method was applied to 2,134 pieces of equipment from the Health Service system of the University of Campinas. Results: From the total, 51.7% of the equipment were classified as C, 4.2% as B and 44.1% as A. The infusion pump for general use was the type of equipment of which most units were in the C class (84.7%), even though almost 50% of them were acquired within less than 9 years, and would thus be expected to be classified as A and B. Among the pumps in class C, 39.5% were from a single manufacturer, although the equipments were acquired recently. Conclusion: The developed classification may be an important tool for raising alerts about equipment more prone to maintenance problems, as well as for identification of equipments with acceptable maintenance history, supporting decision-making on equipment replacement.

Specifications of the modern information system for maintenance of medical equipment in healthcare

Tehnika

Effective management of the maintenance of medical equipment (ME), especially high-tech one, is one of the main issues for the quality of health care, for the provision of cost-effective health services and for saving , even in developed countries, insufficient resources. Medical equipment maintenance (EM) includes all activities related to ensuring an adequate level of service and limiting the downtime of medical equipment in a healthcare organization. Traditionally, EM is categorized as preventive maintenance (PM) and corrective maintenance (CM). The principle of PM is prediction. PM can be planned and predictive, ie. Just-In-Time (JIT) maintenance. Predictive maintenance can only be applied to new high-tech medical devices that have built-in self-testing. Planned preventive maintenance is carried out in accordance with the maintenance plan for a certain period of time. As a rule, when creating the plan, we follow the manufacturer's recommendations for preventive maintenance o...

Quantitative Assessment of Effectiveness and Utilization of Medical Equipment

IJIEM - Indonesian Journal of Industrial Engineering and Management

The problem of operational efficiency assessment of medical equipment is becoming crucial, due to its increasing requirement in hospitals. It has been observed that a significant amount of medical equipment is out of service for several reasons such as lack of training, maintenance and health technology management. The unexpected failures, downtime associated with breakdown and make ready, loss of production and poor maintenance costs of medical equipment are the major drawback in any hospital. Quality of diagnostic and treatment care provided to patients largely depends on the reliability, availability and maintainability of sophisticated medical equipment. Aim of the present study is to determine quantitatively overall effectiveness and utilization of some medical equipment. Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and utilization coefficient is the metric measurement of Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) which specifies effective functioning of devices. The results of the effective...

Two Different Maintenance Strategies in the Hospital Environment: Preventive Maintenance for Older Technology Devices and Predictive Maintenance for Newer High-Tech Devices

Journal of Healthcare Engineering, 2016

A maintenance program generated through the consideration of characteristics and failures of medical equipment is an important component of technology management. However, older technology devices and newer high-tech devices cannot be efficiently managed using the same strategies because of their different characteristics. This study aimed to generate a maintenance program comprising two different strategies to increase the efficiency of device management: preventive maintenance for older technology devices and predictive maintenance for newer high-tech devices. For preventive maintenance development, 589 older technology devices were subjected to performance verification and safety testing (PVST). For predictive maintenance development, the manufacturers’ recommendations were used for 134 high-tech devices. These strategies were evaluated in terms of device reliability. This study recommends the use of two different maintenance strategies for old and new devices at hospitals in dev...

Decision Support Procedure for Medical Equipment Maintenance Management

Journal of Clinical Engineering, 2016

Hospitals outsource several activities of the service support in order to focus on the core healthcare production as maintenance service. Recently, faced to the sophistication and the costs of medical equipment that continue to escalate, governments have implemented new reforms to control costs and improve the efficiency and the quality. Hospitals become interested in minimizing the total operational cost, by optimizing healthcare production planning and their support activities. Reorganizing the medical equipment maintenance service becomes a priority for the hospital managers to reduce the cost and the dependency on external parties while ensuring that the medical devices are safe, accurate, and operating at the required level of performance. In this article, we propose an efficient procedure to take the appropriate decisions for medical equipment maintenance such as the selection of maintenance strategy, the insourcing/outsourcing, and the selection of contracts_ type and content. A practical application of this procedure in the Tunisian context is considered. Nevertheless, our procedure is general and can be tailored to hospitals in both developed and developing countries. Modern medical devices and equipment have become very complex and sophisticated and are expected to operate under stringent environments. Hospitals must ensure that their critical medical devices are safe, accurate, reliable and operating at the required level of performance. 1 According to Khalaf, 2 the greatest problem for many developing countries is not the lack of equipment, but rather that 50% and sometimes up to 75% of the equipment supplied is not operative. As cited by the Centre for Biomedical Engineering and Hospital Maintenance, 3 the main purpose of a biomedical maintenance service is to ensure patient and user safety by maintaining an optimal performance for all biomedical devices. The complexity and the cost of biomedical maintenance have risen sharply in the last few decades. In fact, a maintenance activity is of different types: & Corrective maintenance: This activity is performed after detecting a failure and intended to return the medical device to an operational state. 4 According to Rahman and Chattopadhyay, 5 the strategy of running the equipment until failure does not require any extra labor or a special budget to be applied. Yet, the random downtime and the overuse of the labor to repair the equipment can be costly. & Preventive maintenance: This activity is performed at predetermined intervals or according to prescribed criteria and intended to reduce the probability of failure or the degradation of medical equipment. 6 Preventive maintenance is considered to be potentially effective according to Gits 7 when the equipment suffers from wear-out phenomenon; that is, it has an increasing failure rate. We distinguish 2 categories of preventive maintenance activities: Time-based maintenance (TBM): In this category, the equipment is periodically checked and maintained. This activity can reduce the failure rate of equipment. However, it requires specific resources such as budget and labor to be implemented. 6 Condition-based maintenance (CBM): It requires regular assessment of the system condition during operation. For this category, we need special sensors to measure the prediction variables. 5 Moreover, a statistical model is required to relate the measured variables to the equipment (state) health, for example, equipment remaining useful life.

A Medical Equipment Replacement Model

Journal of Clinical Engineering, 1992

A simple mathematical model has been developed to identify and prioritize medical equipment in need of replacement. The model contains a total of ten attributes addressing four primary replacement issues: equipment service and support; equipment function; cost benefits; and clinical efficacy. Sensitivity to incomplete or subjective data is significantly reduced through the use of a •yes•no ft (0, 1) scoring scheme. Decision.making validity does not appear to be compromised with such a technique. When tested on a sample of 146 medical devices in five different categories. the model recommended that two devices be replaced within the existing fiscal year and eight in the following year, and that fifteen devices be placed in an advisory category. The model's recommendations appear to be compatible with existing subjective criteria.