On just about every consumable product we encounter there is somewhere a date. A date that signifies maybe its manufacturer or maybe an inspection that readied it for consumption or maybe even its expiration as a viable product. The identifying marker may be something as simple as a color coded dot or other marking that is easily visible to the eye and has meaning which can be quickly determined as “yes all is good or stop, there is a problem here”.
If you look across the country’s many biomed program’s you will see a variation of medical device “PM tagging” practices that range from very good to pretty scary! This concept of placing an identifier on a piece of equipment should be fairly straight forward. The tag or label identifies a device has been recognized in someone’s place of business (a.k.a hospital or healthcare provider) and inspected against a recognized protocol or verification process that says it meets safe standards for use in its interaction with patient care. This is where the variation in practices tends to take on different paths that can and sometimes does become a silent time bomb for disaster!
The reasoning for not adopting a practice which utilizes a recognized “PM tagging” protocol does not hold water. Why would a healthcare organization not want to “visibly” ensure their medical devices have been properly and periodically inspected following appropriate maintenance standards? I mean the pharmaceuticals used in the delivery of patient care are dated with labels to make visible their expiration date? Doesn’t this simple practice assure a clinically safe check point and environment for the patients served?
A conversation I once had with a “tenured BMET” was around the practice of “PM tagging” of medical devices. He told me his organization had adopted a policy of not labeling medical devices because it was against their infection control policy. I asked him then how would the clinical user be assured the medical device was current in its required PM inspection cycle and risk classification. He said that’s easy, we inspect and PM all of the inventoried devices in our CMMS database. I asked him how often do you validate the database inventory is accurate? He said, “I don’t think we ever have but we always make our PM numbers each month”. My guess is they have a number of “silent time bombs” out there ready to explode!
