Technical note: preventive maintenance quality assurance.

Performance improvements in healthcare and, specifically, in clinical engineering are required by the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations' Plant Technology and Safety Management (PTSM) documents. The goals of healthcare service quality assurance are to establish performance requirements and improve patient outcomes. It is important that these goals be kept in the forefront of the design of clinical engineering quality assurance planning. Indicator/threshold pairs must be carefully chosen on the basis of some logical relation to the desired goals of the overall program.