Integrated Medical Instrumentation and Devices

The impressive advances in modern medical instrumentation have significantly improved the quality and the efficiency of health care. However, the increasing cost and sophistication of biomedical technology have created other economic and technical problems. The proportion of the health budgets allocated to the purchase and functional cost of new instrumentations is continuously increasing in almost all countries. At the same time, the new equipment becomes more complicated and often requires special handling, calibration and maintenance conditions in order to function reliably and efficiently. The use of informatics either incorporated in biomedical equipment or used to manage it to control them is becoming of a great importance. The various software tools presently available are of rather limited scope mainly addressing maintenance aspects. A more general approach is needed to create a favourable environment for the development and the implementation of systems, addressing not only the management needs but covering all aspects related to the effective safe and reliable use as well as quality assessment of biomedical technology.