A New Approach for Preventive Maintenance Prioritization of Medical Equipment

Efficient maintenance of medical equipment is crucial phase in medical equipment management. Preventive maintenance is a core function of clinical engineering and it is essential to guarantee the correct functioning of the equipment. The aim of this paper is to develop a new model for preventive maintenance priority of medical equipment using the quality function deployment (QFD) as a new concept in maintenance of medical equipment. We developed a 3 domain framework consisting of requirements, function, and concepts. The requirements domain is the house of quality matrix (HOQ) or planning matrix. The second domain is the design matrix. Finally, the concept domain contains the critical criteria for preventive maintenance prioritization with its weights. According to the final scores of the criteria, the prioritization of medical equipment is performed. The data set includes 200 medical equipment belonging to 17 different departments of 2 hospitals in Piemonte; Italy. It includes 70 different types of equipment. Our model proposes 5 levels of priority for preventive maintenance. The results show a high correlation between risk - based criteria and prioritization.