Estimating Clinical Equipment Capital Resources with Qualitative Patient Safety Data

Health care facilities can identify and prioritize patient medical equipment for scheduled replacement by the use of several well documented options.1 Proven metrics include equipment age, estimated useful life, depreciation, maintenance expenditures, and reliability. These approaches are all useful for capital planning purposes but all also require the availability of a reliable clinical equipment data base that includes discrete equipment information such as acquisition cost, date of acquisition, book or depreciated value, detailed preventative maintenance and repair records including frequency and cost of unscheduled maintenance, and mean time between failures.