Development and Evaluation of the WepMEt Platform for Enhancing a Medical Equipment Management in Hospitals

Abstract

Medical equipment management by using computerized systems is a key success of medical equipment maintenance and repair in hospitals. This system, which is installed in the biomedical engineering department, mostly provides an important management function for equipment registration, repair maintenance, and spare part administration. This study presents the development and evaluation of the WepMEt second version platform for managing medical equipment in hospitals across Thailand. The study focused on an improvement and expanding functionality in five key modules: equipment registration, preventive maintenance, repair, spare parts management, and equipment pooling modules, utilizing a rapid prototyping development method. Feedback information from 15 hospitals and primary criticism from five experts in medical equipment management were intently incorporated to improve an original version. Then, the post-development system was assessed in an intensive hands-on training workshop by 23 users from 16 hospitals, both nurses and biomedical engineers, and also the expert, in order to evaluate a satisfaction comment. The results show that our new WepMEt platform was highly accepted, with an average score of 4.73 and 4.75 for the expert team and all users, respectively. Most summarized comments clearly demonstrate effectiveness in comprehensively meeting the user needs, improving management efficiency significantly, and also reducing workload in hospitals. Our future work will be focused on AI technology to facilitate a modernized hospital by integrating administrative decision-making models for equipment maintenance management, enhancing the smart user interface, and incorporating an IoT and cloud computing technology to support real-time equipment tracking.