How to manage the lifecycle of a biomedical asset?

Purchasing a biomedical asset (ventilator, infusion pump, ultrasound device, medical imaging equipment, etc.) is only the start of its story. Installation, use, maintenance, failures, costs and eventual replacement: each stage generates useful information to manage the fleet. Managing the lifecycle of a biomedical asset means maintaining this continuity, from the expression of the need to its withdrawal from service.

To structure tracking of the fleet, interventions and asset history, DimoMaint offers software CMMS adapted to the needs of healthcare facilities and biomedical teams.

What is the lifecycle of a biomedical asset?

The lifecycle covers all the stages a medical device goes through within the facility.
In its technical series on medical devices, the World Health Organization (WHO) separately addresses needs assessment, procurement, inventory management, maintenance and decommissioning of medical devices. These steps form a management chain that extends from identifying the need to removing the asset from service.

Its path can be simply represented as:
Need → selection and procurement → receipt and installation → commissioning → use → maintenance and monitoring → replacement or withdrawal

The value of this view is that maintenance is no longer seen as an isolated activity. Decisions made at procurement influence future maintenance; data collected during operation then inform replacement decisions.

1. Before purchase: think about operating the asset

Lifecycle management starts even before the equipment arrives at the facility. Clinical and technical characteristics are obviously decisive, but other questions should be asked at this stage:

• What skills will be required to maintain it?
• Are spare parts and consumables available?
• What are the installation, training and maintenance conditions?

A device that seems attractive to procure can become more demanding to operate if maintenance is complex or if certain parts become hard to obtain.

These constraints vary greatly by device type: maintaining an infusion pump or a defibrillator does not present the same technical, organisational and availability challenges as maintaining an ultrasound machine, radiology device or laboratory equipment.

2. On receipt: build the asset’s identity

Once the asset is received, the quality of its registration determines much of its future tracking.
Identification, model, serial number, location, commissioning date, supplier, associated documentation, any maintenance contract or status: these details gradually form the asset’s reference file and make it easier to manage assets throughout their lifecycle.

The inventory becomes especially useful when the team needs to retrieve an item’s history, analyse its costs or prepare its replacement.

Field feedback: start with a reliable inventory

This step clearly emerges from the Cap Santé case study. When implementing its CMMS, the biomedical service began by inventorying its assets and centralising information such as locations, interventions, dates, associated documents and costs.
The goal stated by Mr Drufin, the biomedical service manager quoted in this case study, was in particular to have enough information to respond to recurring failures and monitor trends.
Lifecycle tracking therefore starts with a simple piece of data: knowing exactly which asset is in the fleet and having reliable information about it.

3. During operation: build the asset’s history

It is during the usage period that the most valuable information accumulates to understand an asset’s behaviour.
Preventive maintenance, corrective interventions, quality checks, failures, replaced parts, downtime and costs gradually build the technical history of the medical device. This history is one of the foundations of reliable and traceable biomedical maintenance.

A single intervention informs about an incident. Several years of history make it possible to understand how the asset ages.

At the scale of the biomedical fleet, this knowledge also helps identify equipment families that concentrate failures, downtime or maintenance costs.

4. Track the right indicators to detect change

Two devices commissioned in the same year may have experienced very different levels of use, operating conditions and maintenance histories.
To monitor their evolution, a few maintenance indicators can be compared:

• frequency and recurrence of failures;
• duration of downtimes;
• maintenance and repair costs;
• availability of spare parts;
• changes in performance;
• repetition of the same failure.

It is necessary to detect behavioural changes early enough to be able to act. One additional failure does not necessarily require replacement. However, the accumulation of several signals can gradually change the decision.

The history as the asset’s “health record”

This approach also appears in the feedback from the Thiers-Ambert Hospital Centre. Its technical director, Christophe Crespo, describes the complete intervention history as a true “health record” for the assets, enabling retrieval of information about failures and repairs performed.
This continuity of information is especially important when a device remains in the fleet for many years and different technicians are called to work on it.

5. Repair or replace: how to decide?

This is one of the most delicate trade-offs in the lifecycle:
at what point is continuing to repair an asset no longer the best option?
The decision benefits from combining several dimensions:

None of these criteria alone necessarily dictates replacement.
It is their evolution over time and their combined interpretation that document the trade-off between continuing operation, repair, replacement or withdrawal.

6. Anticipate replacement

Lifecycle management makes it possible to gradually identify devices whose continued service should be reassessed. Obsolescence can take various forms. An asset may continue to function but become hard to maintain due to lack of parts. It may remain technically operational while meeting the service’s needs less well. Repairs may also become more frequent or costly.

Replacement then becomes a decision prepared from the asset’s history rather than a reaction to its last failure.
This anticipation also helps the biomedical manager prepare investments: assets to monitor can be identified early enough and budgetary choices supported by factual elements.

7. The CMMS as the lifecycle’s common thread

To make use of several years of information, those data must not be scattered across Excel files, paper documents and individual knowledge.
A CMMS preserves continuity of information during an asset’s life: inventory, location, interventions, preventive maintenance, checks, failures, replaced parts, costs and history.

The CMMS gathers the data that enable professionals to document the decision to replace an asset.

8. Prepare the exit from the fleet

Withdrawal from the fleet is a distinct step: decision to retire, inventory update, retention of necessary information and processing of the device according to applicable procedures.
The WHO dedicates a specific guide to decommissioning to help determine why, when and how to remove a medical device from service.

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