Abstract:
Healthcare industry's key drivers are technological improvements, which have a significant impact on providing best patient care. In recent years, medical equipment used to support highquality patient care has highly increased, however healthcare institutes have been facing a couple of unexpected troubles of medical equipment due to lack of proper preventive measures and maintenance on time leading to the use of equipment in improper condition and increased equipment downtime which can threaten people’s lives and increase the maintenance cost. Therefore, to ensure that equipment is functioning on the required level of performance there is a need of a system that can detect early deviation in normal function of equipment to prevent failure or to detect a failure before it becomes worse beyond repair. In this research, a smart Healthcare technology management (HTM) approach was designed based on real time data acquisition, processing and notification of fault detection outcomes to ensure accurate and timely maintenance strategies. Demonstration of this study was achieved by analyzing medical autoclave’s functionality from King Faisal, Ruhengeri referral hospital and Butaro district Hospitals. In this approach, IoT and sensor technology were utilized to monitor the condition of medical equipment, store collected data on the cloud and in case of abnormal condition, maintenance team received an alter through SMS, and the buzzer is used to alter operator of the machine. In addition, this system has a control relay, which will automatically shutdowns the pump when it is beyond the tolerance range to avoid increment in the fault severity. By reviewing maintenance records, features such as temperature, vibration and power consumption were selected as the parameters that reflect to the status of medical autoclave, with this approach traditional PM and CM maintenance were replaced by condition based maintenance decision making. As a result, maintenance based on condition of equipment strategy will assist in improving PM and CM mechanisms to reduce equipment downtime, unplanned shutdowns, maintenance cost and increase equipment reliability which leads to efficient lifecycle management of medical equipment and hence effective healthcare provision. This approach may be used on other equipment with the same characteristics to offer patients with relevant diagnoses. Moreover this system can be scalable and it is cost effective.
