Designing a Computerized Medical Equipment Management System for Medical Equipment

Abstract

A well designed and properly implemented Medical equipment management system can help not only managing the financial resources but also improves the quality of life. The thesis evaluated the existing medical equipment management practices and processes and came up with a new design to solve the existing problems. In order to properly assign the main requirements of the system design, preliminary study was implemented in the Governmental institutions those responsible for medical equipment management and the major public hospitals of Khartoum locality to assess the main challenges of the medical equipment management process. In-depth interviews were conducted with the biomedical engineers from those Governmental institutions. In addition; Biomedical engineering staff from the hospitals under study were interviewed and asked to full a questionnaire on existing medical equipment management procedures to determine their effectiveness as they managed the life cycle of the medical equipment. This data indicates there is an improper performance in the selection of equipment (65.3% of hospitals), acquisition (70.2% of hospitals), training and skill development (46.9% of hospitals), operation (63.0% of hospitals), Maintenance and Repair (43.2% of hospital) and decommissioning (78.6% of hospitals reported that they have a problem in decontaminating devices before use and after removal) of medical equipment. The results offered the opportunity to design a system to reduce the existing problems and show improvement by increasing efficiency and making the most effective utilization of available resources. An input output model is used to construct the detail design of the Medical equipment management system. It is designed to help the biomedical equipment department in hospitals to manage all the stages of medical equipment life time effectively. As well as linking those governmental institutions with the hospitals so they can access the database of each hospital to monitor the quality of the implementation of effective management. It is a web based application that is accessible almost from everywhere via the Internet. All users of the system with a correct user name and password are able to login to it. The challenges encountered in this thesis included limited number of samples, difficulty to collect questionnaires and testing the system in the real world.