Activity based costing system for medical equipment maintenance process management

Author(s)

Leticia Santos da Rocha

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de Computação
• Defense date: 2005-08-31

Examining board members

José Wilson Magalhães Bassani; Maria Carolina de Azevedo Ferreira de Souza; Carlos ALberto Suslik; Raul Vinhas Ribeiro; Sérgio Santos Muhlen

• Advisor: José Wilson Magalhães Bassani

Abstract

The Center for Biomedical Engineering (CEB) at 8tate University of Campinas (UNICAMP) manages the maintenance activities (corrective and preventive) of about 10,000 medical devices for the health care area of the university, which is comprised by two hospitais, two medical centers and a medicine school. In order to control these maintenance activities, the Clinical Engineering department makes use of a state machine-based management system in which the service orders (80) are characterized by trajectories (sequence of states) constructed while the 80 is processed. The states are microprocesses, which are activated to solve specific tasks. Each transition between two microprocesses (the state transition) is named, in short, a transition. We worked under the hypothesis that it would be feasible to implement at CEB a method for 80 costing based on the Activity-Based Costing (ABC) technique. To test our hypothesis, we made activity, fundamental token for ABC, equivalent to transition. With this approach, we were able to extract the ABC cost of each 80, to estimate cost for a specific service proposal, to exercise the concept of profitability by simulating selling costs for each 80 based in the current market, to explicit activity costs for individual jobs in CEB, and to study the impact of offering external services upon the total amount of activities of a certain "planned profit". By the analysis of 80 involving third party services, we studied the possibility of using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique to choose between third party or in-house services. The different conditions of ABC application in the present work iIIustrated the possibility of using ABC for Activity-Based Management (ABM), with results compatible with the expected figures for a public university health system (which validated our hypothesis). We conclude that our strategy of equivalence between activity and transition made the ABC feasible and relatively simple. We also found that according to the current market prices it is possible to envisage profit even in a health system such as in UNICAMP, in which costs are essentially fixed (e.g. staff, depreciation, general costs) (AU)