Health technology management: implementation and validation of an audit tool

Abstract

Audit in health is a dynamic process and continuous advancement that permits to asses monitor and improve quality standards in healthcare institutions; however, the lack of standardization and reliability of results remains a challenge to be overcome. This study presents the validation of a prototype of an audit tool to the management of medical equipment which took place in two phases: first during the implementation in three hospitals in the metropolitan area of Antioquia, Colombia, and subsequently through the statistical analysis of the trial of twelve selected experts. As results audit reports were generated with strengths and weaknesses points, which enabled us to build improvement measures suitable for hospitals. Measurements of coefficients of reliability (Cronbach α = 0.90) and correlation of experts (Spearman =0.88) indicated favorable results for the tool. In addition, the measurement of mean, standard deviations and coefficients of variation for each item of the validation set out the improvements required by the tool for a future version. This tool is limited to the health regulation in Colombia; nevertheless, the tool is an important step to find and transform the health audits in standardized process that can have an objective assessment. To can be concluded to integrate the biomedical engineer in the activities of audit quality on health with reliable tools offers an important benefit for accurate decision making and timely management of the medical equipment.