Prioritization of medical equipment for maintenance decisions

Abstract

Clinical engineering departments in hospitals are responsible for establishing and regulating a Medical Equipment Management Program to ensure that medical devices are safe and reliable. In order to mitigate functional failures, significant and critical devices should be identified and prioritized. In this paper, we present a multi-criteria decision-making model to prioritize medical devices according to their criticality. Devices with lower criticality scores can be assigned a lower priority in a maintenance management program. However, those with higher scores should be investigated in detail to find the reasons for their higher criticality, and appropriate actions, such as ‘preventive maintenance’, ‘user training’, ‘redesigning the device’, etc, should be taken. In this paper,we also describe how individual score values obtained for each criterion can be used to establish guidelines for appropriate maintenance strategies for different classes of devices. The information of 26 different medical devices is extracted from a hospital's maintenance management system to illustrate an application of the proposed model.

Keywords:

• medical devices
• hospitals
• criticality prioritization
• maintenance decisions
• risk
• MCDM
• AHP

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada, the Ontario Centre of Excellence (OCE), and the C-MORE Consortium members for their financial support. We are thankful to the referees whose constructive criticism and comments have helped us to improve the presentation of the paper and to augment our literature review with new references. Specifically, the remarks concerning the demonstration of the proposed model were very helpful.