Decision Support System for Medical Equipment Failure Analysis

Medical equipment management raises a range of complex problems including those associated with maintenance process. In developing countries, hospitals rarely implement a coherent management plan in medical equipment management. One of the most significant challenges is to distinguish medical equipment that requires repair from those require replacement. Thus, a Decision Support System (DSS) is required to manage this pitfall properly. In this paper, a multi-criteria decision making model, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is presented to select an optimum maintenance strategy. With reference to literature review and experts' opinions; a set of criteria is employed to calculate a criticality score for each piece of equipment. Therefore, a list of equipment is ranked based on their scores and an optimum threshold is selected to differentiate between maintenance and replacement requirements. Fifty different types of medical equipment located in multiple public hospitals have been used in the validation of the proposed model. Results show that the proposed model can efficiently differentiate the equipment that requires repair and the others that needs to be scrapped.