Glossary

The language of the work

27terms you'll meet across our articles — defined plainly, so nobody needs a biomedical degree to follow along.

BMETBiomedical Equipment Technician: The hands-on professional who installs, inspects, maintains, and repairs medical equipment. In many mission hospitals, one BMET — sometimes shared between facilities — is responsible for everything from infusion pumps to imaging.
Calibration: Adjusting and verifying a device against a known standard so its readings can be trusted. A monitor that displays confident, wrong numbers is more dangerous than one that displays nothing.
CMMSComputerized Maintenance Management System: Software that holds a hospital's equipment inventory, service histories, and maintenance schedules. Even a simple CMMS turns repair knowledge from something in one technician's head into something the hospital keeps.
Cold chain: The unbroken sequence of refrigeration that keeps vaccines, blood, and certain medicines effective from manufacturer to patient. Maintaining cold-chain equipment — refrigerators, freezers, temperature monitors — is core biomedical work.
Consumables: The items a device uses up in normal operation — filters, sensors, batteries, paper, reagents, cuffs. A donated device without an affordable consumables supply has a predictable retirement date.
Decommissioning: Formally retiring a device: removing it from clinical use and inventory, salvaging usable parts, and disposing of the rest safely. An honest 'retire' label protects patients as surely as a repair does.
Donation policy: A written rulebook for accepting medical equipment: what arrives with manuals, parts, training, and a plan — and what is politely declined. Often the difference between a donation program and a storeroom of dead machines.
E-wasteElectronic waste: Discarded electronic equipment, medical devices included, containing both hazardous materials and recoverable ones. Equipment shipped without a plan for its end of life eventually becomes someone else's e-waste problem.
Fleet standardization: Choosing fewer makes and models across a hospital or network so training, spare parts, and consumables can be shared. Unmanaged donations push the other way, fragmenting a fleet one well-meant gift at a time.
Grey market: Genuine equipment or parts sold outside the manufacturer's authorized channels. Grey-market goods can be legitimate and useful, but provenance, warranty, and software support are uncertain — which matters more for medical devices than for most products.
HTMHealthcare Technology Management: The discipline of keeping a hospital's medical technology safe, functional, and accounted for across its whole life: planning, acquisition, maintenance, training, and retirement. BMETs, clinical engineers, and their managers all work under the HTM umbrella.
Infusion pump: A device that delivers fluids and medications intravenously at controlled rates. Common, mobile, and heavily used, infusion pumps are a staple of every biomed bench.
ISOInternational Organization for Standardization: The body behind widely used quality and safety standards, including ISO 13485 for medical device quality management. In service conversations, ISO can also mean an independent service organization — a repair company other than the manufacturer.
LMICLow- and Middle-Income Country: A World Bank income classification widely used in global health. In equipment terms, LMIC settings often combine high clinical demand with scarce spare parts, limited service documentation, and few formally trained technicians.
Mission hospital: A faith-founded hospital, often rural, frequently the only substantial medical facility in its region. Mission hospitals are the primary partners of the Global Biomedical Solutions Network.
MTTRMean Time to Repair: The average time a device stays out of service, from failure to return to use. Parts availability, documentation access, and distance to expertise usually shape MTTR more than the difficulty of the fix itself.
OEMOriginal Equipment Manufacturer: The company that made a device. OEM parts, service, and training are typically the reference standard — and, in many countries, the hardest and most expensive to reach.
Oxygen concentrator: A bedside device that pulls oxygen from room air, with no cylinders or piped supply required. A workhorse of district and mission hospitals — dependent on clean filters and stable power to keep working.
PMPreventive Maintenance: Scheduled care — filter changes, battery checks, calibration verification — performed before a device fails rather than after. Small, regular PM dates are the cheapest way a stretched biomed team shrinks its emergency workload.
Pulse oximeter: A small sensor, usually clipped to a fingertip, that measures blood oxygen saturation and pulse without drawing blood. One of the simplest and most widely used monitoring tools in global health.
Remote support: Expert help delivered over a video call or message thread instead of a site visit — a retired specialist guiding a technician through a repair, or a clinician consulting at distance (telehealth). The model at the heart of this network.
Right to repair: The principle that equipment owners should be able to obtain the manuals, parts, software access, and training needed to fix what they own. For hospitals that could never afford service contracts, repair access often decides whether a device lives.
Service manual: The manufacturer's technical documentation for a device: schematics, error codes, troubleshooting procedures, calibration steps. Access to service manuals is one of the central questions in the right-to-repair debate.
Sterilizer (autoclave): A device that uses pressurized steam to sterilize surgical instruments and supplies. When the autoclave is down, safe surgery stops with it.
Uptime: The share of time a device is available for clinical use. In a hospital with one ventilator or one sterilizer, uptime is not a performance metric — it is whether a service exists that day.
Ventilator: A life-support machine that breathes for patients who cannot breathe adequately on their own. Among the most maintenance-critical devices in any hospital, with little tolerance for failure.
WHO Medical Device Technical Series: A set of World Health Organization guidance documents on managing medical equipment: donations, inventory, maintenance, procurement, and the biomedical workforce. Freely available, and the closest thing the field has to a shared textbook.