Designing a decision support system for improving medical devices maintenance in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

According to the World Health Organisation, up to 70% of the medical devices in the developing world are broken, and up to 96% of them are out of service. Medical devices are not only essential for safe and effective patient care but also has a significant impact on the income of healthcare organisations. So, medical devices maintenance requires careful supervision by healthcare administrators who may not have the technical background to understand all the relevant factors. This research aims to design a decision support system for improving medical devices maintenance in Saudi Arabia to help the decision makers on all the maintenance stages needs. Also, to determine the parameters involved in medical devices maintenance in Saudi Arabia, and to identify the best international practice experiences in medical devices maintenance. The research had reviewed theoretical background for medical devices maintenance followed by reviewing the previous studies in good practices in medical devices maintenance through gathering good national practices from Saudi Arabian organisations, good international practices from international organisations, good postgraduates’ dissertations include master’s and PhD thesis and reviewing good technical academic papers. The methodology of the research used the descriptive approach through main seven steps: First, designing a survey of the clinical engineering department in Saudi Arabia that has an overview of medical devices maintenance in Saudi Arabian hospitals. The survey contains four main parts: general Information, structure, personnel, responsibilities, and resources. Second, applying the survey and collected the designated information. Third, designing a questionnaire of evaluating current management performance for medical devices maintenance in Saudi hospitals through the nine main stages of medical devices maintenance life cycles as follows: 1. Planning, 2. Acquisition 3. Delivery and Incoming Inspection; 4. Inventory and Documentation 5. Installation, Commissioning, and Acceptance 6. Training of Users and Operators 7. Monitoring of Use and Performance 8. Maintenance 9. Replacement or Disposal. Forth, validating the questionnaire for consistency and stability. Fifth, applying the questionnaire and collected the designated information. Sixth, designing the proposed decision support system. (Chapter 6). Finally, validating the proposed decision support system. The research outcomes contain two main contributions; firstly, designing a questionnaire to evaluate the clinical engineering department services through 64 clinical engineering program indicators. Second, developing the proposed decision support system that had been validated by experts in the field to make sure the system is suitable to evaluating current management performance for medical devices maintenance in Saudi Hospitals including the validation study for the system. The proposed decision support system aims to facilitate the introduction of grades, and the extraction of averages and reporting system is designed using Microsoft Access, where the system has four main features: setting, evaluate reports, and resources. Finally, the study came up with some recommendations to improve medical devices maintenance in Saudi Arabia.