Decision Support Procedure for Medical Equipment Maintenance Management

Abstract

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:

An ontology-driven model for hospital equipment maintenance management: a case study

“…The third and last module deals with the maintenance externalization decision, including the selection of an appropriate contracting policy for each externally maintained device. In developing countries, including the country in which the current study is conducted, there are generally four types of contracts to choose from (Masmoudi et al. , 2016): Type A*: Full package contract with all risks covered and all maintenance tasks, both corrective and preventive, performed by the subcontractor. Type A: It covers all TBM tasks, including both spare parts and labor. Type B: It involves the tasks related to either TBM, CBM or both of them combined and covers only the spare parts. Type C: It involves on-demand interventions, with neither spare parts nor labor costs covered under the contract.…”

“…The third and last module deals with the maintenance externalization decision, including the selection of an appropriate contracting policy for each externally maintained device. In developing countries, including the country in which the current study is conducted, there are generally four types of contracts to choose from (Masmoudi et al, 2016):…”

Dependability-based maintenance optimization in healthcare domain

“…They used the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) method consisting of six criteria (risk, equipment function, age, utilization, redundancy and mission criticality, recalls and maintenance requirements) and then suggested heuristic guidelines to select the appropriate maintenance strategy. The same heuristic reasoning was recently used by Masmoudi et al (2016) to decide the type of maintenance policy (outsourcing/in-house) and select the suitable service contract. They developed a criticality-based model with consideration of maintenance resources performance, risk and cost criteria.…”

Review in Maintenance Strategies for Haemodialysis Machine in Healthcare Facilities

“…Equipment maintenance and repair is the most critical function which supports proper delivery of healthcare services. The WHO [11] observed that the biomedical engineers ought to optimize the best maintenance strategy to reduce the failure rate of medical equipment to improve the medical equipment reliability. The biomedical engineering sector has to ensure the safety of the equipment and the reduction of maintenance cost is paramount.…”