Evidence-Based Maintenance (2010)

In Brief Although medical equipment maintenance has been well planned and executed for more than 30 years, very few studies have been conducted to measure and evaluate its effectiveness in terms of reliability and seriousness of failures. The lack of factual evidence limits the ability of clinical engineering (CE) professionals to revise maintenance strategy and improve the effectiveness of their work, as well as focus on the equipment and tasks that could provide the highest return for their limited resources. Using a small set of failures codes, data were collected from 8 hospitals for a period of up to 24 months, covering more than 40,000 pieces of equipment. Careful analysis of more than 62,000 work orders collected showed that the failures found for each type of equipment within a single hospital tend to converge to a stable pattern with less than 100 work orders. Furthermore, failure patterns obtained from different hospitals for the same equipment type seem to be within statistical variation of each other, although these hospitals may use different brands and models of equipment, in addition to obvious differences in user care and training, utilization intensity, and other environmental factors. The failure data collected were used to determine the probability of failure that will be used in subsequent papers of this series to compare different maintenance strategies adopted at different hospitals, as well as to determine additional opportunities for CE professionals to contribute to enhance patient safety beyond increasing equipment reliability through maintenance. Although medical equipment maintenance has been well planned and executed for more than 30 years, very few studies have been conducted to measure and evaluate its effectiveness in terms of reliability and seriousness of failures. The lack of factual evidence limits the ability of clinical engineering (CE) professionals to revise maintenance strategy and improve the effectiveness of their work, as well as focus on the equipment and tasks that could provide the highest return for their limited resources. Using a small set of failures codes, data were collected from 8 hospitals for a period of up to 24 months, covering more than 40,000 pieces of equipment. Careful analysis of more than 62,000 work orders collected showed that the failures found for each type of equipment within a single hospital tend to converge to a stable pattern with less than 100 work orders. Furthermore, failure patterns obtained from different hospitals for the same equipment type seem to be within statistical variation of each other, although these hospitals may use different brands and models of equipment, in addition to obvious differences in user care and training, utilization intensity, and other environmental factors. The failure data collected were used to determine the probability of failure that will be used in subsequent papers of this series to compare different maintenance strategies adopted at different hospitals, as well as to determine additional opportunities for CE professionals to contribute to enhance patient safety beyond increasing equipment reliability through maintenance.