Critical assessment of medical devices on reliability, replacement prioritization and maintenance strategy criterion: Case study of Malaysian hospitals

The Biomedical Engineering Maintenance Services (BEMS) is a comprehensive maintenance program that ensures the safety and reliability of medical devices. Significant and crucial devices are identified and prioritized for best practice prior to the equipment life cycle to mitigate functional problems, alarmed by the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) underlying the modernization agenda. A model of multi‐criteria decision‐making (MCDM) to prioritize medical devices according to their criticality is presented in this paper, with the utilization of quality function deployment (QFD) and fuzzy logic in the development of the model through a quantitative survey of experts from all regions in Malaysia. As a result, a customized version of the Asset Criticality Assessment (ACA) is developed and is recommended for use in more than 144 Ministry of Health (MOH) hospitals. Subsequently, real data of four selected devices are pulled from the Asset and Services Information System (ASIS) to demonstrate a relevant and comparable end‐result using the QFD and fuzzy logic. In essence, the key contribution of the customized ACA model is that it assesses a promising evaluation with a broader range on both the performance of medical devices and the appropriate asset replacement choices. This leads to an effective maintenance strategy for each device and the modernization of reliability computation metrics.