A Comprehensive Medical Equipment Management Software System for Increased Patient Safety

Abstract

The role of medical equipment in diagnostic and therapeutical services in patient care is of prime importance. Accurate and efficacious use of medical equipment, regular calibrations, strict monitoring of failures and clinical alarms all positively affect the clinical services to improve patient safety. The fundamental step in medical equipment management is to create a comprehensive inventory of medical equipment and to make all necessary information available. Risk issues, device failures, performance and safety testing and calibrations, and alarms are recorded and converted into meaningful statistics of output data, including graphs and reports. Recording the clinical alarms and collecting the relevant data to categorize and prioritize them is necessary to avoid the harms caused by nuisance/false alarms, and identify the causes for the clinical alarms. Collecting and managing such big data on a software is much easier and more effective. To tackle this problem, a medical equipment management system, shortly called the MEDQ system, is developed as a customized web project using (.Net) MVC5 language using the Microsoft Azure Platform.