Service documentation and the biomedical engineer: results of a survey.

It is essential that medical equipment manufacturers provide high quality service documentation for their products. Without it, the maintenance and repair of equipment becomes difficult and inefficient for biomedical engineering departments. Due to the key role documentation plays in their daily work, biomeds expect high quality manuals covering issues such as equipment installation, maintenance, troubleshooting and repair. A survey of 40 biomeds in the US and UK confirms that service manuals play a key role in troubleshooting equipment failures. It also showed that 65% of respondents rate service manuals on average as good rather than very good and indicated a number of areas which manufacturers can improve in their documentation, including diagrams and troubleshooting flowcharts. These results have strong implications for medical manufacturers—there are a number of issues that need to be improved in order to make documentation more effective. Introduction High quality service documentation is central to the role of biomedical engineering departments—without good documentation, effective equipment maintenance and repair becomes difficult, or even impossible. Surprisingly, considering the key role of service documentation, there has been comparatively little written about the characteristics of good medical equipment documentation. What are the attributes of good service documentation? What are biomeds’ key documentation requirements? Are equipment manufacturers meeting these? What are the trends in documentation requirements? These were the sort of questions which prompted a survey of biomedical engineers’ views on technical documentation. The need for a survey was established from a review of the literature. The importance of good quality documentation is mentioned in a number of papers which are reviewed in the next section. However, it appears that no surveys have been previously