An Automated Evaluation System for Medical Equipment Based on Standardization

Abstract

Medical equipment is the main important part of the healthcare services system. Efficiently purchasing such a critical issue is a challenge. Time, effort, and expenses are spent to select the most appropriate required medical equipment. Also, this selection may not do in the best way. Therefore, planning for a public tender is essential to select the most appropriate required medical equipment. In this paper, an automated evaluation system based on standardization to select the most appropriate medical equipment from presented offers is presented. The Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method is used to evaluate the offers of medical equipment considering its resultant scores. Further, a software program is designed and implemented to evaluate the offers in terms of general, technical, and financial criteria. Each criterion has a set of evaluation points. A score index is generated for each criterion separately. The Emergency Care Research Institute (ECRI) is selected to be the technical reference for medical equipment specifications. In application, a set of medical imaging equipment such as X-Ray, Computed Tomography (CT), MRI, and ultrasound are used to test the software program. The results demonstrate a convenient utilization of the program considering the goal of this study. To improve the healthcare services in hospitals, the automated evaluation system based on standardization presents an automated platform to introduce, evaluate, and rank the offers of medical equipment.