A Clustering-based Approach for Maintenance Prioritization of Medical Devices in a New Hospital

Medical devices are fundamental to preventing, diagnosing and treating disease and high availability of them is vital for the uninterrupted operation of a hospital. That is why hospitals should plan and carry out maintenance activities to keep their medical devices in a healthy operating condition. The effectiveness of these activities can be increased by determining the maintenance priorities of devices. On the other hand, setting individual priority to each device becomes complicated when a hospital has hundreds of medical devices. In this concern, grouping medical devices and determining group-based maintenance priorities will be more advantageous for maintenance planning. In this study, a novel approach is proposed for the maintenance prioritization of medical devices in a new hospital. In the proposed approach, first prioritization attributes are defined and weighted using analytical hierarchy process (AHP). Then, medical devices are grouped based on the predetermined attributes by using data clustering. Finally, maintenance priorities of medical device clusters are determined based on weighted sum of cluster centers.