A New Approach of System Engineering to Medical Device Lifecycle Management

Today’s, more than 10000 types of different medical devices are currently employed in medium and large hospitals. These devices have an important role in the diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring processes in health centers. An efficient preventative maintenance program of these devices is essential to guarantee the correct functioning and ensure the safe and reliable operation of them. As the maintenance activities increase as increasing the variety of medical devices, the need for a better maintenance management system become more essential than the past. In this paper a new multi-criteria decision-making approach of system engineering to lifecycle management and preventive maintenance priority of medical devices based on a kind of quality function deployment is presented. The model was implemented and tested in three public hospitals in one of the western provinces of Iran. None of the three hospitals had established a proper assessment management program processes to identify their equipment needs and required maintenance priority based on their annual budgets. Our suggested model solved one of the big decision problems in their management system, the results helped them to have a priority list of the medical devices that should be replaced and the preventative maintenance priority of critical devices based on the wards, type and number of them according to the available budget. Implementation of our proposed model in medical centers can maximize the reliability of equipment and systems among the limitation of organizational resources and budgets