Web-Based Experience Sharing Platform on Medical Device Incidents for Clinical Engineers in Hospitals

The aim of this study was to establish a web-based platform for exchanging medical device management and maintenance experiences to enhance the professional competency of clinical engineers (CEs), which ensures the quality of medical devices and increases patients' satisfaction with medical services. Medical devices play an essential role in diagnosis and disease management. CEs are responsible for providing functional medical devices that contribute worthwhile functions to a medical service to improve patients' health and safety. The purpose of the platform is to facilitate collection and sharing of medical device incidents experiences to improve CEs' capability. To provide useful and practical information for CEs, an event review committee, composed of experts with more than 20 years of clinical engineering experience who were recruited as reviewers, was established under the platform. Cases submitted to the platform were required to have comprehensive descriptions of the device and events. Each case was evaluated by at least two reviewers based on five evaluation indices: (1) severity, (2) breadth, (3) frequency, (4) insidiousness, and (5) correctness. After being reviewed, each final report was published on the platform to be shared with the event submitters and other members. The results show that 116 staffs from 32 different hospitals, registered to join this platform. From January 2015 to December 2016, 70 events were submitted with 56 reports. This study also assessed the platform's benefits for CEs. A total of 93 respondents completed a questionnaire survey: 93% of the CEs agreed that the information from the platform helped them do their job. The web-based platform has high value as an experience-sharing interface for medical devices. The CEs obtained extremely useful information from the platform for medical device management and their daily duties. This study provided an online training model with systematic methods to improve the quality and effectiveness of medical device management.