A new perspective on risk control for medical hospital technology

Gerson Florence e Saide Jorge Calil

Universidade Estadual de Campinas
Electrical and Computing Engineering College
Biomedical Engineering Department -DEB
Post Office Box (Caixa Postal) 610 CEP 113083-970, Campinas, SP
E-mail: gerson@ceb.unicamp.br, calil@ceb.uncamp.br

Abstract

There is a growing concern among health professionals as to the safety of their team and patients within the hospital environment. Dangerous situations involving electromedical equipment (EMEs) are among those factors affecting safety, such as dangerous events due to EME’s performance failure (e.g. infusion pump delivery error on medicine dosages and failure on alarm triggering of monitoring and life support equipment), inefficiency of electrical safety systems (electrical shocks on patient and health care team members during surgeries caused by EME’s poorly insulated and grounded), electromagnetic interferences, hospital infections and others. Considering such context, increasing levels of security regarding equipment use in hospital environments are required, as we technologically evolve. Aiming the fulfillment of the corrective and preventive maintenance programs, risk management techniques do provide a new perspective to improve risk control of EME’s uses approaching broadly all security matters related to such equipment.

Keywords: Risk management, medical hospital technology.

mciencia@unicamp.br