ABSTRACT
This chapter presents various aspects of medical equipment reliability. It covers medical equipment reliability-related facts and figures, medical devices and medical equipment/devices categories, methods and procedures for improving the reliability of medical equipment, human error in medical equipment, medical equipment maintainability and maintenance, sources for obtaining medical equipment reliability-related data, useful guidelines for healthcare and reliability professionals for improving medical equipment reliability, and problems. The methods and procedures for improving the reliability of medical equipment are parts count method, failure modes and effect analysis (FMEA), general approach, fault tree analysis (FTA), and the Markov method. The human error in medical equipment section covers important medical equipment/device operator errors and medical devices with high incidence of human error.
There are ten problems at the end of the chapter to test the reader’s comprehension in the area and the sources of most of the material presented in the chapter are given in reference section. They will be useful to readers if they desire to delve more deeply into a specific area.
