Abstract
Maintenance is a crucial subject in medical equipment life cycle management. Evidence-based maintenance consists of the continuous performance monitoring of equipment, starting from the evidence—the current state in terms of failure history—and improvement of its effectiveness by making the required changes. This process is very important for optimizing the use and allocation of the available resources by clinical engineering departments. Medical equipment maintenance is composed of two basic activities: scheduled maintenance and corrective maintenance. Both are needed for the management of the entire set of medical equipment in a hospital. Because the classification of maintenance service work orders reveals specific issues related to frequent problems and failures, specific codes have been applied to classify the corrective and scheduled maintenance work orders at Careggi University Hospital (Florence, Italy). In this study, a novel set of key performance indicators is also proposed for evaluating medical equipment maintenance performance. The purpose of this research is to combine these two evidence-based methods to assess every aspect of the maintenance process and provide an objective and standardized approach that will support and enhance clinical engineering activities. Starting from the evidence (i.e. failures), the results show that the combination of these two methods can provide a periodical cross-analysis of maintenance performance that indicates the most appropriate procedures.Graphical abstractThe left side shows a block diagram of the process needed to calculate the proposed set of KPIs, starting from technological, organizational and financial data. On the upper right it is shown an example of scheduled maintenance analysis for a specific class of equipment (legend in the article body). The bottom right part shows how the KPIs can be implemented in a business intelligence dashboard.
Highlights
Today’s rapid and continuous technological evolution, which affects most production sectors, involves healthcare
By analysing all the equipment classes used in the hospital, a characteristic performance shape may be obtained for this specific hospital, which can be used to make comparisons/benchmarks with other hospitals
The graphs obtained through the analysis of corrective maintenance (CM) work orders (WOs) are in the first column
Summary
Today’s rapid and continuous technological evolution, which affects most production sectors, involves healthcare. The complexity of the technological assets found in healthcare facilities, in terms of number and diversity, is reflected in the complexity of technology management, which must be efficient so that the equipment can always be used safely and appropriately. There are two main types of maintenance required for medical equipment in all hospitals: scheduled maintenance (SM) and corrective maintenance (CM). SM, in compliance with the manufacturer’s instructions, includes the operations performed at scheduled times to reduce deterioration from use (often referred to as “preventive maintenance”) or the occurrence of functional failures. CM comprises the repair of the equipment’s functions (i.e. its restoration) as well as its replacement when repair is not feasible due to costs or obsolescence [15]
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