Service Documentation and the Biomedical Engineer: Results of a Survey

Abstract

It is essential that medical equipment manufacturers provide high quality service documentation for their products. Without it, the maintenance and repair of equipment becomes difficult and inefficient for biomedical engineering departments. Due to the key role documentation plays in their daily work, biomeds expect high quality manuals covering issues such as equipment installation, maintenance, troubleshooting and repair. A survey of 40 biomeds in the US and UK confirms that service manuals play a key role in troubleshooting equipment failures. It also showed that 65% of respondents rate service manuals on average as good rather than very good and indicated a number of areas which manufacturers can improve in their documentation, including diagrams and troubleshooting flowcharts. These results have strong implications for medical manufacturers—there are a number of issues that need to be improved in order to make documentation more effecti