Prioritisation Assessment and Robust Predictive System for Medical Equipment: A Comprehensive Strategic Maintenance Management

The advancement of technology in medical equipment has significantly improved healthcare services. Failures in upkeeping reliability, availability, and safety affect the healthcare services quality and significant impact can be observed in operations’ expenses. The effective and comprehensive medical equipment assessment and monitoring throughout the maintenance phase of the asset life cycle can enhance the equipment reliability, availability, and safety. The study aims to develop the prioritisation assessment and predictive systems that measure the priority of medical equipment’s preventive maintenance, corrective maintenance, and replacement programmes. The proposed predictive model is constructed by analysing the equipment features of 13,352 medical equipment used in public healthcare clinics in Malaysia. The proposed system is divided into three stages: prioritisation analysis, model training, and predictive model development. In this study, we proposed 16 combination of novel features to be used for prioritisation assessment and prediction of preventive maintenance, corrective maintenance, and replacement programme. During the prioritisation analysis, the modified k-Means algorithm is proposed to automatically distinguish raw data into three main clusters of prioritisation assessment. Subsequently, these clusters are fed into and tested with six machine learning algorithms for the predictive prioritisation system. The best predictive models for medical equipment’s preventive maintenance, corrective maintenance, and replacement programmes are selected among the tested machine learning algorithms. Findings indicate that the Support Vector Machine performs the best in preventive maintenance and replacement programme prioritisation predictive systems with the highest accuracy of 99.42% and 99.80%, respectively. Meanwhile, K-Nearest Neighbour yielded the highest accuracy in corrective maintenance prioritisation predictive systems with 98.93%. Based on the promising results, the proposed prioritisation assessment and predictive systems can be widely adopted by clinical engineers and healthcare providers in managing expenses, reporting, scheduling, materials, and workforce.