ICIS Quarterly Meeting: Evidence-Based Maintenance: How to Evaluate the Effectiveness of your Maintenance Strategies

Binseng Wang, ScD, CCE – Vice President, Performance Management & Regulatory Compliance, ARAMARK Healthcare’s Clinical Technology Services

Clinical engineering (CE) professionals have realized for some time that the “preventive maintenance” (PM) that they have been performing for many years is no longer able to prevent any failures, although some safety and performance inspections (SPIs) can help detect hidden and potential failures that affect patient safety. To help CE professionals decide whether they should continue to perform scheduled maintenance (SM) or not, a systematic method for determining maintenance effectiveness has been developed. This method uses a small set of codes to classify failures found during repairs and SM (PMs and SPIs). Analysis of the failure patterns and their effects on patients and users allows CE professionals to compare the effectiveness of different maintenance strategies, and justify changes in strategies, such as decreasing SM, deploying statistical sampling, or even eliminating SM.