Articles

Not surprisingly, most-if not all-healthcare organizations look upon unscheduled equipment downtime as a significant impediment to providing excellent patient care. Equipment failures are encountered virtually every day wherever medical devices are in use, and each and every one of the subsequent repair calls starts the equipment downtime clock running. Although it is not strictly logical, it has been a longstanding tradition to use equipment downtime as a measure of the effectiveness of the facility's equipment maintenance program. This article discusses "a new line of attack" for reducing equipment downtime.

Earlier this year at the AAMI conference in Baltimore during the Technical Iconoclast session, I presented my findings on the topic of what should be considered life support equipment in the context of The Joint Commission's (TJC) current standards. Open-ended wording by the FDA and TJC has led to many wasted hours as health care professionals struggle to identify for their individual hospitals what constitutes "life support equipment." Since that time, what I presented has continued to generate discussion among members of the clinical/biomedical engineering community. The key part of what I presented is the idea of creating a task force of recognized experts to develop a prescriptive list of equipment that all hospitals could choose to use instead of having to develop their own list based on an analysis of the generally worded definitions published by the FDA and TJC. The result would be more consistency and increased patient safety.

Whether you call it planned maintenance or use the more traditional term of preventive maintenance (PM), you will certainly have noticed the still-current, somewhat obsessive emphasis on getting PMs done on time. A powerful mystique has grown up around the presumed "preventive" aspect of PM that is difficult to explain in simple, rational terms. Simple logic suggests that a well-designed and well-implemented PM program does provide two benefits that can be important. The discussion below is intended to examine the extent to which PM can really improve equipment reliability, downtime, and level of safety.

Les Atles has undertaken an impressive effort as editor in putting together a book designed to help broaden the knowledge and enhance the training of biomedical technicians and clinical engineers. This book is a joint effort that includes contributions from many of the profession's leading experts. The list of authors reads like a who's who in clinical engineering.