Quantitative techniques for medical equipment maintenance management

The maintenance department in a hospital is responsible for ensuring the safety of medical equipment and their availability while keeping the operation costs at minimum. The selection of the best maintenance strategy is a key decision to reduce the equipment downtime, increase the availability, and bring down the maintenance costs. In this paper, we use an integrated approach that includes several tools from the literature, namely, AHP, TOPSIS, and MILP, to provide the decision maker with an entire solution to the problem. These three tools are introduced to: 1) determine the criticality of medical equipment; 2) rank the different maintenance strategies based on their importance; 3) select the optimal maintenance strategy for the devices while keeping the total maintenance costs within budget. We applied our approach to 'Habib Bourguiba' hospital in Tunisia, and the numerical results show the efficiency of our approach to improve the availability of critical devices. [Received 19 October 2015; Revised 16 February 2016; Accepted 11 April 2016]