Abstract
Due to its advanced technology, maintenance services of healthcare equipment have been commonly executed by the original equipment manufacturer (OEM), which can be characterized as a monopolist. In this context, hospitals require high availability of their equipment at a reasonable servicing cost, whereas OEM aims to maximize its profit by selling extended warranty (EW) services for multiple consumers. The issue of drawing a maintenance contract between OEM and hospitals has already been treated by adopting a Stackelberg’s game. However, the “as good as new” and “as bad as old” assumptions are usually considered, which are rather difficult to observe in practice, especially for healthcare institutions and their technology-intensive equipment. Thus, we here adopt generalized renewal processes (GRP) for modelling imperfect repairs, and we develop a discrete event simulation method for finding the best strategies of each player: OEM sets the prices for EW and on-demand maintenance that optimize its profit, while hospitals choose which option they should hire. We also present an application example with real data gathered from an angiography device, which is used for mapping blood vessels and diagnosing heart diseases.
Highlights
Medical equipment plays an important role in modern healthcare institutions because they present the following purposes: diagnosis, disease prevention, monitoring and patient treatment
Considering this device is subject to imperfect repairs, we need to use the simulation-based solution proposed in the previous Section to reproduce the Generalized Renewal Process (GRP)-queue system
A decision model for an Extended Warranty involving hospitals and Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) was proposed. For modelling this situation and determining the players’ optimal strategies, a Stackelberg Game (SG) formulation was employed, with the OEM being the leader and the hospital the follower. This situation is commonly found in the market of technologyintensive equipment, which is characterized by a greater bargaining power for the manufacturer, which is the only part capable of performing maintenance interventions adequately
Summary
Medical equipment plays an important role in modern healthcare institutions because they present the following purposes: diagnosis, disease prevention, monitoring and patient treatment. Among different games that can be used to model the interaction between agents, the leader-follower Stackelberg Game (SG) is a good option for drawing maintenance service contracts of medical equipment In this context, the OEM is commonly the only party able to perform maintenance, since it has the technical knowledge, expertise, technology and spare parts for the repair execution (Rinsaka & Sandoh [33]). Such studies have simplifying assumptions with respect to the state of the system after a corrective maintenance (CM) intervention Those papers considered that the system returns to either an “as good as new” condition (perfect repair) or an “as bad as old” condition (minimal repair); these two situations are modeled respectively according to a Renewal Process (RP) and a Non-Homogeneous Poisson Process (NHPP); Ross [34] describes RP and NHPP in details.
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