Evidence-Based Maintenance

In Brief Almost since the beginning of clinical engineering as a profession, the need for scheduled maintenance (mostly safety and performance inspections) and its appropriate frequency have been debated extensively but could not be resolved conclusively because of the lack of comparable data. The combination of regulatory requirements typically based on manufacturers' recommendations and concern for patient safety discouraged experimentation by clinical engineering professionals and thus limited the possibility of comparisons within the same organization. Lateral comparisons among different hospitals have been difficult because of different computerized maintenance management systems, failure classification, and reluctance to share information. Using a small set of standardized failure codes, more than 62,000 work orders were classified by dozens of biomedical technicians at 8 hospitals for almost 2 years. These data were used to compare different maintenance strategies adopted for 7 types of medical equipment commonly encountered in acute-care hospitals. No prominent differences were found among the data collected from hospitals that adopted different maintenance frequencies, statistical sampling, and even run-to-failure strategies. Most of the small differences were comparable to the SDs calculated from the data for each maintenance strategy. These results suggest that it is justifiable to adopt a less resource-demanding maintenance strategy for most equipment types, except for the scheduled replacement of wearable parts that was outside the scope of this study. Almost since the beginning of clinical engineering as a profession, the need for scheduled maintenance (mostly safety and performance inspections) and its appropriate frequency have been debated extensively but could not be resolved conclusively because of the lack of comparable data. The combination of regulatory requirements typically based on manufacturers' recommendations and concern for patient safety discouraged experimentation by clinical engineering professionals and thus limited the possibility of comparisons within the same organization. Lateral comparisons among different hospitals have been difficult because of different computerized maintenance management systems, failure classification, and reluctance to share information. Using a small set of standardized failure codes, more than 62,000 work orders were classified by dozens of biomedical technicians at 8 hospitals for almost 2 years. These data were used to compare different maintenance strategies adopted for 7 types of medical equipment commonly encountered in acute-care hospitals. No prominent differences were found among the data collected from hospitals that adopted different maintenance frequencies, statistical sampling, and even run-to-failure strategies. Most of the small differences were comparable to the SDs calculated from the data for each maintenance strategy. These results suggest that it is justifiable to adopt a less resource-demanding maintenance strategy for most equipment types, except for the scheduled replacement of wearable parts that was outside the scope if this study.