Criticality Analysis of Medical Equipment: A Case Study at King Hussein Cancer Center (KHCC) Amman-Jordan

Abstract

Proper maintenance management of medical equipment is of prime importance to the health sector as otherwise this would result in poor treatment, longer waiting times and patients suffering as well as draining, the normally limited, financial resources of most public medical institutions. King Hussein Cancer Center (KHCC), Amman-Jordan is a unique medical institution where treatment of different types of cancer is provided and where equipment unavailability is considered a risky event which may result in life-threatening complications.  This is especially true for critical treatment equipment. Criticality analysis was performed on a representative sample of medical equipment at KHCC in order to assess and improve the effectiveness of current maintenance management policy. A sample of twenty-one medical devices was selected for this study. Past failure and maintenance data, in addition to relevant financial information, were collected for these devices and compiled into criticality ranks.  In order to take account of the special nature of these equipment medical criticality (in terms of risk score) values were also calculated based on relevant tables of the American Society for Healthcare Engineering (ASHE). Overall criticality ranking of medical equipment was then determined based on equipment cost, ASHE risk score, reliability and maintenance cost.  The present results have revealed major flaws within the purchase and maintenance policies at KHCC. For example, some extremely expensive devices with extremely high-cost maintenance contracts were revealed to exhibit low reliability values and suffer from repeated failures. These were within patient-sensitive equipment cancer treatment devices. The results also have shown that under "less than optimum" maintenance practice, the ASHE risk score may be a misleading measure of equipment criticality. This was shown by comparing the obtained overall equipment criticality to their ASHE risk score where high level of discrepancy was present between the two measures.