Proposed: a standard clinical engineering review procedure

Those overseeing clinical engineering (CE) functions at the top policy level--the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO), and others in the profession--depend on sporadic assessments of nonstandard samplings of data when analyzing CE functions such as maintenance compliance, risk and failure analysis, and inventory management. This methodology results in the following: a fragmented view of operational functions, a limited view of the interrelationships of CE functions, and policies that reflect assumptions of equipment reliability.