Medical Equipment Maintenance Outsourcing

Hospitals are professional institutions providing medical services,with the main purpose of saving the wounded and rescuing the dying.With the development of medical science,computer science,artificial intelligence,more and more professional,precise,intelligent medical equipment has been introduced into clinical diagnosis and treatment.Therefore,qualified medical equipment plays a decisive role in the auxiliary diagnosis and guarantee of our patients' health,which also promotes the development of medical equipment maintenance industry.In general,repair and maintenance services for medical equipment are monopolized by the original equipment manufacturer(OEM)because it retains the technical expertise,tools,spare parts and proprietary informationWe are concerned with the optimal decision problem in warranty policies for medical equipment in hospitals.As a result,a Stackelberg game,where the OEM is the leader and the hospitals are the follower,is appropriate for modeling the decision process between the OEM and the hospitals.Two classes of hospitals are considered,i.e.large general hospitals and small and medium ones.Six extended warranty(EW)policies are offered by the OEM,namely A1—signing a premium EW package containing periodical preventive maintenance(PM)and failure repair services with priority;A2—signing a premium EW package containing only failure repair services with priority;A3—signing a standard EW package containing PM and failure repair services without priority;A4—signing a standard EW package containing only failure repair services without priority;A2—paying for each repair service on demand with priority;and A6—Paying for each repair service on demand without priority.We then propose a model to analyze the interaction among hospitals and OEM.An application example is used to demonstrate the proposed model,and a sensitivity analysis is also performedBy use of queuing models and Monte Carlo simulation,we can obtain the equilibrium solution.The main finding is that the optimal policy is Ai for both classes of hospitals.OEM can obtain more economic benefits from larger public hospitals,which is more motivated for OEM to provide more public hospitals with high-quality maintenance,servicing more medical equipment.Besides,expanding the recruitment of maintenance engineers or improving the technology can also improve the profit growth.It is also revealed that a warranty policy including both PM and failure repair,compared with one offering only failure repair,is a Pareto improvement.As a result,PM should be adopted as a standard practice in medical equipment services.