A FUZZY APPROACH FOR MEDICAL EQUIPMENT REPLACEMENT PLANNING

Management of hospital service is continuously faced with the reduction of costs by introducing new operational criteria in allocating both technical and human resources. Managing thousands of medical devices is time-consuming and costly. An effective maintenance management can result in a significant reduction of operational costs. However, medical devices are often not properly managed and this leads to their rapid obsolescence. An accurate process of equipment state appraisal is required. On one hand, in case of a increasing failure rate of medical devices an increase of both break-down maintenance costs and risk of unfavourable events are expected. On the other, if devices are replaced too early, an increase of purchase costs will occur. A trade off between cost policies and a high quality level of service is a common management problem. In this paper, a fuzzy inference model is proposed to identify the equipment to replace in order to achieve the goals of reducing expenditure in a hospital structure and to increase patient and medical staff satisfaction. The model considers both linguistic and quantitative parameters, estimated in an objective way, in order to include many of the factors that actually influence replacement decisions with an approach that is unique yet simple to use in the healthcare context. The model is applied to a full case study. The results obtained from a test conducted on 100 medical devices encourage the use of the model for decisions regarding replacement planning