Application Of Pareto's Law In Medical Equipment Maintenance

Only a few percentage of hospital departments contribute to about 70 per cent of total yearly equipment downtime, informs Deepak Agarkhed

The penny saved on capital expenditure can be pound foolish when it has to be spent on maintenance of medical equipment. The maintenance strategy, where there are ranges of equipment in hospital, can be adopted by using various quality tools.

The analysis is based on Pareto's law which states that in any large number we have 'significant few' and 'insignificant many'. This tool is widely used in a process improvement methodology like Six Sigma wherein it forms the important part of Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control (DMAIC) tool.

The Pareto's law is an effective tool for hospital medical equipment maintenance management in the following areas:

• The classification of equipment.
• The maintenance expenditure analysis.
• Routine preventive maintenance.
• Critical analysis.
• Defect analysis.

The information from multi-speciality hospital asset management software was collected and complied to do the ABC analysis.

Equipment Classification & Maintenance Expenditure Analysis

All the major capital medical equipment like MRI, CT Scan and cathlab can be grouped in type A. All the life -saving critical equipment like ventilator, defibrillator, intra-aortic balloon pump, can be grouped as type B equipment. Rest all equipment can be grouped as type C.

As it can be observed from the above bar graph, although total type A equipment quantity is only at 15 per cent, the percentage of equipment cost of type A is around 65 per cent of the total cost. The chart below shows that the yearly percentage equipment maintenance cost of type A is around 61 per cent of the total yearly equipment maintenance cost.

The close monitoring of performance and maintenance cost of type A is very important and will reflect on overall performance of the maintenance department. The information related to each type A equipment like downtime, frequency of breakdown, spare and annual maintenance cost should be reviewed on regular basis and should be part of weekly MIS report review by the top management.

Routine Preventive Maintenance

The table below shows that routine maintenances and regular calibrations is considerably less in type B and type C of equipment in one year. This information has helped hospital biomedical engineering department to immediately take necessary corrective steps and not ignore proactive maintenance of all equipment in hospital.

Critical Analysis For Hospital User Department

Few percentage of hospital department contribute to about 70 per cent of total yearly downtime. These departments need special attention from biomedical engineering department and individual equipment in each department should be critically evaluated, as also the service history of equipment.

Defect Analysis For Particular Equipment

The table below shows the usage of Pareto principal analysis of defects in given equipment in one year.

The few repeated errors like error due to PH electrode in given equipment contributes to more breakdown frequency and downtime. The biomedical engineer should identify these defects, understand the root cause for the same and devise suitable operator training and preventive maintenance schedule accordingly. The application of ABC analysis can be extended to many more areas in maintenance and is an eye-opener as it addresses important gray areas which are generally overlooked by biomedical engineering maintenance team.

The writer is Divisional Head-Biomedical Engineering Department, Artemis Healthcare
Email: deepakva@artemishealthsciences.com