A Framework of Medical Equipment Management System for In ...

A. The system network architecture
The system network architecture (Fig. 1) was designed
under the consideration of data safety and work performance.
This was divided into three parts. First, the intranet in hospital
connects the overall operating computers of hospital and the
hospital information system (HIS). HIS sends some basic
information of medical equipment (such as budget, purchase,
and property information) to the MEMS. The inner users can
also access MEMS through the intranet. Second, the MEMS
was set up in the intranet of CED and connected to the
intranet of the hospital through a router. The architecture will
increase the work performance for the inner users of CED in
input or query data to MEMS and system maintenance. In
addition to MEMS, the local network also includes a Web
server of CED and a database. Third, the Web server of CED
connects to the internet through a firewall and provides a
service for supporting outside branch member to access the
database of CED, which shares related information like the
procurement, maintenance, and contract related.
Fig. 2. Relationship between the modules of the medical equipment
management system.
B. The medical equipment management system architecture
The MEMS, the main elements is shown in Fig. 2, which
contains ten sub-systems, i.e. the basic information,
procurement, acceptance, discard, maintenance, installation
verification, warranty inspection, prevent maintenance, and
contract management. These systems were designed
according to the operational activity of CED. On the basis of
different operating attribution, they can be classified into four
groups.
The first group is the basic information, which primarily
provides fixed information to other sub-systems such as
inventory information, staff data, equipment maintenance
vendors, user department and their cost center code. These
data comes from HIS and automatically updates. When a user
operates other sub-system and inputs a key word, this related
basic information will be loaded to an appropriate field. The
mechanic will reduce the user operating time and increase the
data correctness.
The second group contains the procurement, acceptance,
and discard practices. These practices focus on document
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assessment. Therefore, the timing record is crucial to the
daily work activities of engineer in CED. Biomedical
managers must be able to correctly assign staffs for the right
job and to monitor the rate of progress. The administrative
staff needs to record the right date and time at different
conditions such as receipting, dispatching, inspecting, and
closing in service case. Besides, the date and time data will be
automatically reloaded by the system when a user inputs the
case number. Moreover, the engineer needs to key in the
assessing results to the system. The history information of
related equipment could also be queried by these sub-systems.
The maintenance function is used for amending the error data
and provides managing authorization for a specific user.
The third group is mainly aimed at medical equipment
maintenance and the repair work of CED, which is the busiest
in MEMS for daily work. In NTUH, the repair cases were
around eighty thousand per year. Its users include clinical
staffs of the hospital and administrators and biomedical
engineers (BME) in CED. To clinical staffs, its function is
like an order work system when the equipment has a
breakdown. Besides, it also provides user tracing the progress
and content of maintenance or repair. For administrators in
CED, their major works focus on inputting the time to the
system when the repair case is in the key point such as receipt,
dispatch, user retrieve, and close moment. For engineers in
CED, they input the repair content, delay reasons, and the
finished time of ending repair. Besides, the biomedical
mangers can query related statistics from the sub-system to
obtain performance indicators, to determine equipment
failure trends, to identify training needs, and to produce
management reports.
The final group includes warranty, maintenance, and
contract management systems. The attribution of the group
belongs to managing activities which have the property of
period plan in advance. So, the system can send a notice to an
engineer according to the important time point of
predetermined schedule such as warranty expired, executing
prevent maintenance, or carrying out the contract service.
This information can be triggered by BME to print a work
order. Besides, the BME can also set and manage related
equipment list and time schedule. The query function shows a
list of requesting work orders in the certain period. All the
content of performance in the group will be integrated with
the general maintenance of data. To query by inventory
number, the user can easily get related information with
different maintenance stratagems for certain equipment.
Finally, the maintenance statistic function provides
biomedical managers the information about the performance
of BME and outsourcing.
C. Developing tools
The developing tools are used for web page design and
database building. First, the web pages of MEMS were
designed by the Visual studio C# and the web server of CED
by the FrontPage and Dreamweaver, because the software is
easy to get and easy to use. The C# was adopted by the IT