Medical Equipment Management - Work Order Management

Work Order Management

Work order management involves systematic, measurable, and traceable methods to all acceptance/initial inspections, preventive maintenance, and calibrations, or repairs by generating scheduled and unscheduled work orders. Work order management may be paper-based or computer-base and includes the maintenance of active (open or uncompleted) and completed work orders which provide a comprehensive maintenance history of all medical equipment devices used in the diagnosis, treatment, and management of patients. Work order management includes all safety, preventive, calibration, test, and repair services performed on all such medical devices. A comprehensive work order management system can also be used as a resource and workload management tool by managers responsible for personnel time, total number of hour’s technician spent working on equipment, maximum repair dollar for one time repair, or total dollar allowed to spend repairing equipment versus replacement. Post-work order quality checks involve one of two methods: 100% audit of all work orders or statistical sampling of randomly selected work orders. Randomly selected work orders should place more stringent statistical controls based on the clinical criticality of the device involved. For example, 100% of items critical to patient treatment but only 50% of ancillary items may be selected for sampling. In an ideal setting, all work orders are checked, but available resources may dictate a less comprehensive approach. Work orders must be tracked regularly and all discrepancies must be corrected. Managers are responsible to identify equipment location