Clinical/Biomedical Engineering Strategic Graphical Dashboard to Enhance Medical Device Maintenance and Asset Management

Historically, clinical/biomedical engineering departments in hospitals have lagged in adoption of some of the leading-edge information system tools used in other industries. The clinical/biomedical engineering staff is responsible for ensuring that all medical devices are safe and ready to use, whether actively used in a hospital or buried deep in a stack of containers that the military keeps for emergency deployment. This present application is part of a DOD-funded Phase 2 SBIR grant to improve the overall Knowledge Management and Strategic and Tactical Decision Making for medical technology management issues, and it using strategic graphical dashboards (SGDs) to enhance usability. In general, in the past decade, each individual Air Force, Army, Marine, Navy Surgeon General only had oversight of their individual global medical supplies and resources, but in recent years they have been able to share a global enterprise by using a program called the Joint Medical Asset Repository (JMAR). One important role of this new and novel SGD is to enhance JMAR to allow much better clinical/biomedical enterprise management. The finished product was named JEDI (JMAR Executive Decision Initiative), and it was built on top of JMAR’s core Oracle database. JEDI uses custom-written, JAVA-based web-apps to deliver dynamic, integrated, point-and-click graphic objects such as gauges, fuel tanks, and geographic information system (GIS) maps to improve and accelerate decision making. This Business Intelligence (BI) leverages the JMAR data; it allows realtime interactive data-mining tools and provides executive dashboards for rapid data analysis. Using JEDI, the military’s global clinical/biomedical engineering resources can now be more efficiently and rapidly reallocated to military, veteran, family, or emergency civilian purposes. The safety, maintenance, and reliability of medical device inventories can now be maintained using lean approaches, with peak demands managed by interactive dashboards that reduce workload and errors.