Information Engineering Department, University of Florence, Via S. Marta, 3, 50139, Florence, Italy.
ESTAR - Dipartimento Tecnologie Informatiche e Sanitarie UOC, Tecnologie Sanitarie AOU Careggi/Meyer, Largo Brambilla 3, 50141, Florence, Italy.
Med Biol Eng Comput. 2019 Oct;57(10):2215-2230. doi: 10.1007/s11517-019-02021-x. Epub 2019 Aug 10.
Maintenance is a crucial subject in medical equipment life cycle management. Evidence-based maintenance consists of the continuous performance monitoring of equipment, starting from the evidence-the current state in terms of failure history-and improvement of its effectiveness by making the required changes. This process is very important for optimizing the use and allocation of the available resources by clinical engineering departments. Medical equipment maintenance is composed of two basic activities: scheduled maintenance and corrective maintenance. Both are needed for the management of the entire set of medical equipment in a hospital. Because the classification of maintenance service work orders reveals specific issues related to frequent problems and failures, specific codes have been applied to classify the corrective and scheduled maintenance work orders at Careggi University Hospital (Florence, Italy). In this study, a novel set of key performance indicators is also proposed for evaluating medical equipment maintenance performance. The purpose of this research is to combine these two evidence-based methods to assess every aspect of the maintenance process and provide an objective and standardized approach that will support and enhance clinical engineering activities. Starting from the evidence (i.e. failures), the results show that the combination of these two methods can provide a periodical cross-analysis of maintenance performance that indicates the most appropriate procedures. Graphical abstract The left side shows a block diagram of the process needed to calculate the proposed set of KPIs, starting from technological, organizational and financial data. On the upper right it is shown an example of scheduled maintenance analysis for a specific class of equipment (legend in the article body). The bottom right part shows how the KPIs can be implemented in a business intelligence dashboard.
维护是医疗设备生命周期管理中的一个关键课题。循证维护包括对设备进行持续的性能监测，从证据（即故障历史的当前状态）开始，并通过进行必要的更改来提高其效率。这一过程对于优化临床工程部可用资源的使用和分配非常重要。医疗设备维护由两项基本活动组成：计划性维护和纠正性维护。这两者都是医院中管理整套医疗设备所必需的。由于维护服务工单的分类揭示了与频繁问题和故障相关的具体问题，因此已在意大利佛罗伦萨的Careggi 大学医院应用特定代码对纠正性和计划性维护工单进行分类。在这项研究中，还提出了一组新的关键绩效指标，用于评估医疗设备维护性能。本研究的目的是将这两种循证方法结合起来，评估维护过程的各个方面，并提供客观和标准化的方法，以支持和加强临床工程活动。从证据（即故障）出发，结果表明，这两种方法的结合可以提供维护性能的定期交叉分析，指出最合适的程序。
