Implementing a Failure-Rate Enhanced PM Program

Abstract

As cost centers, clinical engineering departments are continuously looking for ways to safely and effectively get the most out of our valuable resources. If you were to question most of the professionals—technicians and leadership—in our field, they would overwhelmingly agree that many productive hours are lost completing planned maintenance (PMs) on equipment that will not remotely reduce the potential for failure. The Joint Commission encourages and gives organizations the flexibility to develop risk-based programs to utilize these resources productively while maintaining the highest level of patient safety. There are many different programs that have been designed to tackle this task. Many of them quantitatively formulate PM frequencies by using a risk score. Other programs focus on a PM sampling technique. Some programs use a combination of both. There is no doubt that these programs are safe and effective, but what if we developed a program that utilized equipment history to calculate the failure rate of a particular device category? We could then use these failure rates to adjust the depth and frequency of a PM to have a measureable, quantitative impact on preventing equipment failures. In this article, we will walk you through a process for reclassifying the traditional equipment risk groupings into PM frequency priority levels, establish failure-rate benchmarks utilizing a simple formula, and tell you how to apply the results to adjust PM frequencies.