Web-based Medical Equipment Management System in Seven Referral Hospitals
Medical devices are an integral part of healthcare service delivery and they are used for monitoring, diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation of patients. Proper utilization of medical devices is important for ensuring the safety of users and patients, reducing downtime, improving the quality of health services and increasing the benefit of financial investment. The aim of this study was to assess the utilization of medical devices and to develop web-based medical equipment management system. Both quantitative and qualitative data has been collected for the study. The data collection was conducted between August 26, 2017 to September 20, 2017 in all the seven government owned teaching hospitals which are found in Addis Ababa and Hawassa cities. On average, each hospital delivered services for more than 3 million populations, and had more than 17 service standards, 330 medical equipment and 500 beds during the research period. Data were collected by observation of available resources, interviewing selected professionals about their services and also through questionnaire which was filled by biomedical engineers and biomedical technicians who assessed the utilization phase of healthcare technology management in the seven hospitals. According to the data collected, more than half (17/31) of the respondents did not know the exact number of medical equipment in their facility and there were only 29% (2/7) of hospitals which had recommended test equipment and workshop space in their facilities and almost all hospitals did not have international standards and guidelines and also service manuals. The percentage of respondents who didn't agree on the availability of reference materials, electrical safety and performance test equipment, sufficient user and maintainer training, sufficient maintenance staff, preventive maintenance schedule for all medical equipment were 74%, 77%, 65%, 54% and 36% respectively. In order to better manage medical devices, we have designed and developed an automated medical equipment management system that can be deployed in a hospital. The system is developed using HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL. We strongly believe that such automated system helps to improve communication between system users, decrease resilience on human role, reduce data redundancy, allow multiple users to access the data, enhance the security of the equipment, improve planning and budgeting for medical equipment.