In his January/March 2008 Journal of Clinical Engineering article, Clinical Engineering Benchmarking: An Analysis of American Acute Care Hospitals, Binseng Wang, ScD, CCE, Vice President, Performance Management and Regulatory Compliance for ARAMARK Healthcare’s Clinical Technology Services group, reported detailed analysis of data collected by Thomson Reuters from 253 acute care hospitals exploring a variety of different metrics, such as:
- Total number of scheduled maintenance work orders completed in a year as a function of the total number of capital equipment owned by the hospital
- Percentage of CE departments that have administrative support as a function of the number of FTEs
- Total number of FTEs in the CE department as a function of adjusted discharges
- The total number of pieces of capital equipment and unscheduled repairs completed in a year as a function of the hospital’s total patient occupancy percentage
- CE labor expense versus total CE expense
- Parts and supplies expense versus total CE expense
- Service contract expense versus total CE expense
- Total cost of management and maintenance of medical equipment (total CE expense) versus the total capital acquisition costs
- Total CE expense versus the total number of beds that are staffed and operated by each hospital
- Total CE expense versus adjusted patient discharges
- Total CE expense versus the total number of capital equipment it maintains
- Total CE expense versus the hospital’s total operating expense.
From this study, Dr. Wang concluded that using multiple comparisons (both financial and operational) one can gain valuable insights into the current performance of a CE department and find areas that deserve further scrutiny to reveal unique characteristics and/or opportunities for improvement.
For a briefer commentary on clinical technology benchmarking, Dr. Wang authored an article in the October 2009 issue of 24×7 magazine that focuses on technology and service solutions for biomed. Here is a link: http://www.24x7mag.com/issues/articles/2009-10_10.asp.
