A New Approach for Effective Reliability Management of Biomedical Equipment

Abstract

Within the modern hospitals, an increasingly common problem is the efficient management of the maintenance of biomedical equipment. If effective management of medical equipment maintenance is applied, quality health services could be provided by reducing the downtime of medical equipment as well as by decreasing the recovery time for treatment of patients. Risk based maintenance strategy helps in designing an alternative methodology to minimize the risk by identifying the breakdown pattern and then increasing the reliability. The probability of failures that obstruct the reliability can be influenced by some technical, administrative or management actions. The proposed study is based on the analysis of reliability and availability for maintenance planning on the basis of risk index and fault tree analysis. Maintenance of equipment is prioritized based on the risk which helps in reducing the overall risk of the hospital. Fault tree diagram is also developed to understand the actual scenario where highest priority or risk events are sequentially arranged. Failure probability for different biomedical equipment has been established by applying statistical method. It has been observed that Magnetic Resonance Imaging has the lowest risk index while X-Ray has the highest risk index. Also, maintenance planning has been suggested based on the reduction of risk factor to meet the acceptable criteria and reduce the probability of failure. This approach depicts that reliability of equipment is increased after implementation of maintenance planning proposed which contributes to the availability of the equipment as well as its safe operation.