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Prioritization of medical equipment for maintenance decisions

  • Theoretical Paper
  • Published:
Journal of the Operational Research Society

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.

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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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

    S Taghipour, D Banjevic & A K S Jardine

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  1. S Taghipour
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  2. D Banjevic
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  3. A K S Jardine
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Correspondence to S Taghipour.

Appendices

Appendix A

Qualitative grades and intensities for criteria/sub-criteria

We explain how the intensities for grades of criterion ‘Function’ can be obtained; the intensities of other criteria's grades are obtained using the same method.

Step 1: Pairwise comparison matrix of the grades is constructed using expert opinion (α ij for i=1, …, 5, j=1, …, 5). (Table A1).

Table a1 Pairwise comparison matrix for the grades of criterion ‘Function’
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Step 2: The weight of each grade can be obtained as follows:

Step 3: The intensity of each grade can be obtained as follows:

See Table A2.

Table a2 Calculating intensities for the grades of criterion ‘Function’
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The same method is employed for calculating the intensities of other criteria (Tables A3, A4, A5, A6, A7, A8, A9, A10, A11, A12 and A13).

Table a3 Function grades and intensities
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Table a4 Utilization grades and intensities
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Table a5 Availability of alternatives grades and intensities
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Table a6 Age grades and intensities
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Table a7 Failure frequency grades and intensities
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Table a8 Failure detectability grades and intensities
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Table a9 Downtime grades and intensities
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Table a10 Cost of repair grades and intensities
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Table a11 Safety and environment grades and intensities
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Table a12 Recalls and hazards grades and intensities
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Table a13 Maintenance requirements grades and intensities
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Appendix B

Calculating the lower bound for the total score value

Table B1 shows how a score value of 0.1050 is obtained when a device gets the lowest intensity value with respect to all assessment criteria.

Table b1 Calculating the minimum total score value
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Thus, the minimum total score value is,

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Taghipour, S., Banjevic, D. & Jardine, A. Prioritization of medical equipment for maintenance decisions. J Oper Res Soc 62, 1666–1687 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/jors.2010.106

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