PCD Brief Profile Proposal MEM
1. Proposed Workitem: White Paper - Medical Equipment Management (MEM)
- Proposal Editor: Todd Cooper, Manny Furst
- Editor: Steve Merritt
- Date: N/A (Wiki keeps history)
- Version: N/A (Wiki keeps history)
- Domain: PCD
NOTE: This work item proposal is based on the MEM whitepaper released in Sept. 2009: PCD_MEM_WP_Discussion
2. The Problem
Medical equipment is quickly becoming less manageable by traditional methods. Most healthcare delivery organizations (HDO) must manage tens of thousands of medical devices representing numerous makes and models. The management of these devices involves a wide array of activities including planning, procurement, inspection, inventory, testing, monitoring, maintanence, and de-commissioning. Common activities include unique device identification, ongoing or periodic determination of the device's location, operational status, battery level and charging profile, software / hardware configuration including serial numbers, pending upgrades or software updates, remote maintanence, and risk management. Traditionally medical devices have functioned as stand alone, or perhaps locally networked without the capability to transmit information outside of their own realm. As more equipment becomes connected to the enterprise network, it would be beneficial to equipment management activities to also be able to use these networking capabilities. Currently there are no common standards-based technologies for supporting these device management and maintenance activies. There are several vendor dependant methods in use across the industry showing that this is possible.
There are several potential benefits of this electronic approach to medical equipment management.
- Increases in patient safety by having safer, more reliable equipment available to clinicians when and where they need it
- Reducing equipment failures through proactive maintanence
- Managing the risk associated with networking medical devices
- Making sure devices are configured correctly
- Evidence based maintanence planning could be fully realized with the automated, electronic reporting of maintanence information, this could allowdevices to be scheduled for maintence when they actually need it
- Devices could also be more effectively used requiring less inventory.