Why it’s important, why it’s neglected, and what you can do to make it easier and reap the benefits

Understanding preventive maintenance for medical devices

For any medical device, preventive maintenance (PM) is proactive routine maintenance—anything from cleaning and lubrication to corrections and adjustments, calibrations and re-calibrations, repairs or part replacements—performed on a schedule recommended by the device manufacturer to minimize performance degradation or risk of equipment failure.
Preventive maintenance is purely proactive—it is performed (or intended to be performed) regardless of a device’s apparent condition, or how well the device is performing or seems to be performing. Other types of maintenance, such as condition-based maintenance, usage-based maintenance or corrective maintenance, are performed only when a device exhibits a specific type of problem or reaches a certain milestone.

Predictive maintenance is often used as a synonym for preventive maintenance, but the two are different. Predictive maintenance is a combination of condition-based and preventive maintenance. It involves collecting performance and condition data from devices and processing that data with algorithms that can predict potential issues or failures and recommend preventive maintenance before those issues occur.

Why PM for medical devices is important

PM helps ensure reliable medical device and equipment performance

Medical equipment failures, breakdowns, downtime and malfunctions put patient safety, health and lives at risk.

This applies not only to biomedical, diagnostic or critical care devices—laboratory testing equipment, imaging machines, life support and resuscitation devices—but to any device or piece of medical equipment used to deliver patient care. A malfunctioning medical cart battery can delay access to critical patient data just as effectively as a malfunctioning patient monitor or broken-down MRI machine.

Preventive maintenance helps mitigate this risk by preventing many device and equipment failures before they happen. A 2022 study of medical device maintenance work orders found that the more preventative maintenance is performed on medical devices, the less corrective maintenance (i.e., fixing device problems reactively, when they arise) is required, and the more time it will take before the devices require corrective maintenance—meaning more devices perform as expected for longer periods of time between failures.

PM reduces medical device-related costs

A preventative maintenance program can reduce the costs associated with medical devices by:

• Reducing downtime. Upkeep is less costly than downtime. For example, one study found that unplanned downtime for a CT or MRI unit can cost a medical facility between $60,000 and $120,000 per incident. Another study pegged the cost of medical equipment downtime as high as $8,000 per minute.
• Reducing the need for equipment repairs. Medical device repairs are expensive, with average costs ranging from hundreds of dollars to repair an IV pump, to hundreds of thousands of dollars to repair a surgical robot. Emergency repairs for essential devices add to or in some cases multiply these costs.
• Lengthening device lifespan. Preventive maintenance can extend the lifespan of medical equipment by preventing condition and performance issues from progressing to irreparable damage. A recent study found that failure to perform preventive maintenance reduced medical equipment lifespan by 39 percent.
• Keeping warranties in force. Failure to perform preventive maintenance according to the original equipment manufacturer’s instructions and recommended schedule can nullify any warranty on the equipment. When performed on schedule, preventive maintenance of medical equipment can also help healthcare organizations get ahead of warranty-related issues they otherwise might not identify until after warranties expire.

PM is required for accreditation and regulatory compliance

Several regulatory bodies—including The Joint Commission (JCAHO), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—each require hospitals and other medical facilities to perform preventive maintenance for various types of medical devices. Compliance involves documentation that demonstrates all preventive maintenance activities are completed on time as specified by device and equipment manufacturer’s recommendations.

In cases where manufacturer-recommended PM requirements are not provided, healthcare organizations must create an alternative equipment maintenance (AEM) plan that demonstrably maintains the device in line with regulatory requirements for patient and clinician safety. A healthcare organization can also propose an AEM to replace the manufacturer’s guidelines, if the organization develops or finds PM practices and schedules that are more efficient and effective (while also meeting regulatory patient and clinician safety requirements).

Why hospitals fall short on medical device PM

The importance and benefits of medical device preventive maintenance are clear. So why do hospitals neglect it, or neglect to complete it in line with manufacturers’ recommended maintenance schedules?

• Insufficient or inaccessible medical device data. In many hospitals, medical device data or scattered across multiple applications; too often, finding a specific device is often the first insurmountable challenge to applying PM.
• Scheduling complexity. The average healthcare organization uses hundreds or thousands or different types of medical devices, each with its own manufacturer-recommended or AEM preventive maintenance schedule. Coordinating and communicating these schedules across multiple hospital or facility locations, departments and technical support teams is an incredibly complex task.
• Real-time care priorities. In a hospital there is rarely a good time for planned downtime, particularly for life-saving devices in perfect working order. For example, a healthcare facility may not want to take a dialysis machine offline for three to five hours for planned but purely proactive maintenance, when it could be used to treat another patient instead.
• Lack of onsite device maintenance expertise. It can be difficult and expensive for healthcare organizations to find and hire medical device technicians who possess the knowledge, skills and certifications to perform preventive maintenance on the vast array of devices and equipment in the hospital—and to keep technicians current with furious advances in medical device technology.
• Lack of cost transparency. Whether performed by in-house or outsourced technicians, PM takes time and costs money—often more time and money than healthcare organizations forecast or budget for when they purchase medical devices and equipment. And PM costs can increase as original service contracts expire, or as devices age.

Some best practices for better medical device PM

A detailed description of best practices for medical device preventive maintenance—and for overcoming the associated challenges and objections—could fill a large textbook. But there are a few foundational concepts to prioritize when starting or improving a medical device PM program.

Building a comprehensive medical device inventory

Any successful medical device PM practice begins with a complete, accurate medical device and equipment inventory that includes all relevant information for every device deployed at the hospital—its age, location, condition, manufacturer’s maintenance recommendations, maintenance history, service and support history, associated maintenance and support costs, warranty status and more.

In cases where the medical device inventory is incomplete or unavailable—such as when PM hasn’t been performed or documented in a while—hospitals might consider a medical device assessment. This typically includes inspection of some or all devices by the device manufacturer or a manufacture-recommended third party, followed by a full condition report. It may also include and service and repair recommendations where necessary to bring devices up to par.

Winning enterprise-wide support

Top-to-bottom buy-in—from executive management, to clinicians, to IT and technical support staff—is crucial for building and operating an effective, cost-effective medical device PM program.

PM advocates should build a data-driven, example-backed business case for medical device PM as a strategic initiative for the healthcare organization, with quantifiable benefits for stakeholders at every level. This can include:

• Comparing the costs of planned downtime for PM vs. unplanned downtime due to device failures and emergency repairs
• Demonstrating how PM supports and streamlines regulatory compliance efforts and helps avoid fines and penalties
• Correlating uninterrupted device performance with improved patient safety and clinical outcomes
• Addressing clinical concerns over planned downtime with provisions for backup devices during PM activities

Reach out to other medical facilities or healthcare organizations for their PM success stories. Or start with pilot program, focused on a particular device or department, to demonstrate the potential of an organization-wide preventive maintenance program.

Leveraging enterprise software, AI and automation

Today it’s difficult or impossible to manage a medical device PM program using multiple spreadsheets or siloed, device- or manufacturer-specific applications. It’s also entirely unnecessary, thanks to enterprise software solutions that manage everything about device maintenance from a single point of control. These include:

• Computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS): A CMMS maintains a centralized database of maintenance information and helps organizations, plan, track and automate maintenance scheduling, work orders, reporting and more.
• Enterprise asset management (EAM) systems: An EAM system is a superset of CMMS—it helps organizations manage the entire lifecycle of their physical assets, from acquisition through retirement and disposal—and including maintenance.

CMMS and EAM can take much of the complexity out of managing medical device PM across thousands of devices in scores of locations. CMMS and EAM solutions typically aren’t specific to the healthcare industry (although industry-specific versions do exist). But when deployed in healthcare organization they should integrate seamlessly with other hospital systems, including medical device asset tracking and help desk ticketing solutions.

Artificial intelligence (AI) offers the potential to transform almost every business function and discipline, and preventive maintenance is no exception. Autonomous AI agents are being used to monitor medical devices continually, predict device issues or failures more accurately, and to schedule preventive maintenance at optimal times—all with minimal or no human intervention. Augmented reality (AR) applications can guide technicians through maintenance inspections, service and repairs in real time based on what they ‘see’—offering the potential to dramatically reduce the time and cost of training PM technicians.

Healthcare organizations should look for opportunities to adopt these and other emerging technologies to make medical device PM more effective and cost-effective.