Medical maintenance performance monitoring: a roadmap to efficient improvement

Abstract

Today, medical equipment become more sophisticated and complex, and hospitals must ensure that their critical devices are safe, accurate, reliable and operational at a required level of performance. For decades, dependability engineering has been applied successfully in many industries to improve the performance of equipment maintenance. Many performance measurement frameworks have been developed and widely used to achieve the excellence of maintenance service, namely the balance of performance, risks and cost. However, the application of all these techniques and models for medical maintenance management remains limited. This study aims to analyse the effectiveness of maintenance management in a healthcare industry. The conceptual framework was designed to scrutinise the relationship between these variables: types of maintenance strategies, dependability criteria, maintenance costs, and risks. The proposed model is illustrated through a reel case study in a healthcare centre to pick up the insufficiencies and propose a roadmap to improve the maintenance management of medical devices.