A Pilot Study of Biomedical Engineering Shared Service for Hospitals in Madinah Munawwarah

Ministry of Health in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia manages the biomedical departments in its affiliated hospitals by contracting with suppliers/manufacturers. We collected data related to the number of relevant work force and the expenses incurred by surveying nine hospitals in Madinah Munawwarah region of the kingdom by designing a proper questionnaire. We found it to manage in two ways (a) having low qualified team members to serve less sophisticated medical equipment, and (b) outsourcing the needed service to repair or do preventive maintenance especially for high-tech medical devices. This common and traditional way of biomedical management costs a lot of money and consumes long time to repair the faulty medical units. In order to minimize the repair cost and time, here we propose a model of management techniques that falls in a category popularly dubbed as Shared Service Center (SSC). As per the SSC model presented in this study the staff's salaries are projected to be increased by 13.5% but a huge savings of up to 62.21% on staff's salaries and Planned Preventive Maintenance (PPM) cost are estimated as compared to the current situation. A big 81.47% saving as compared to present total service contracts value is predicted with the proposed SSC model. The result is consistent with Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 and the National Transformation Program 2020 to improve the quality of health services and efficiency of using available resources.