Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to minimize the corrective breakdowns produced in the electromedical equipment of a healthcare organization. To this, an optimization plan of maintenance policies will be developed. This plan includes the creation of preventive maintenance datasheets. The data used in this research has been obtained from the Computerized Maintenance Management System which owned by the healthcare organization. Different types of rankings have been made in the stocks to prioritize items by family of equipment and by average work orders by equipment generated. The maintenance tasks are optimized to preserve the satisfactory working conditions and the performance of equipment in the healthcare organization optimizing available resources. All of this is intended to anticipate the maintenance activity to breakdowns and to prevent the care quality from diminishing by increasing the patient waiting time by unavailability of medical equipment in the treatments and diagnostic tests.
TopBackground
For a long time, maintenance has been understood as part of the work that encompassed only the repairing breakdowns occurring in the machines and therefore, the employer included it as an economic burden to bear. However, this concept has progressively evolved over time until nowadays that is considered as a productive activity of the organization. Therefore, the role of maintenance has gained great interest and importance. Improving maintenance in a company is seen as an investment that will have a positive impact on quality and availability of the product as well as on productivity of the organization (Alrabghi & Tiwari, 2016).
It is common to consider in literature (see Dekker, 1996; Scarf, 1997; Eti, Ogaji, & Probert, 2006; and Hamdi, Oweis, Zraiq, & Sammour, 2012), that maintenance is the function responsible for ensuring availability of equipment and machines of a company; that is, it is associated with a set of actions that aim at preserving the assets (equipment and facilities) of the company during the period of useful life of these. Based on the criteria developed by cited authors above, the definition of maintenance is set as the range of activities performed to a system, equipment or component to ensure that it continues to perform desired functions within an operational context given at the lowest possible cost. The main objective is to preserve its function, good operating conditions, to optimize performance and to increase the useful life, by ensuring optimal investment of resources.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Maintenance: A set of actions responsible for ensuring machines and production equipment availability in a company.
ABC Analysis: Rating method based on Pareto principle. In maintenance of equipment, allows to identify items depending on generated impact and divide them into three group to establish an order of priorities when managing maintenance.
Work Orders (WOs): Generated document when a failure of any equipment occurs in order to achieve maintenance tasks to solve the problem.
Electromedical Equipment: Equipment and facilities belonging to a healthcare organization.
Maintenance Datasheet: Document which specifies preventive maintenance activities that are required to minimize corrective maintenance of electromedical equipment to comply with safety parameters.
Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS): A software package which manages resources of maintenance department, incorporating a database continuously updated. It allows to schedule preventive, corrective and predictive maintenance tasks.
Electromedical Department: Technical service department whose activity includes total maintenance of medical equipment in a healthcare organization and specific facilities which provide coverage the same, as well as management through the inventory unit responsible for updating existing equipment.
Healthcare Organization: Center that provides health services such as diagnosis of diseases, surgical operations and treatment and recovery of patients. Also, research and teaching assignments can be performed.