Benchmarks to measure clinical engineering activities

A new study in Biomedical Instrumentation & Technology reports on the findings of a study that is the first phase of a project to develop benchmarks to measure clinical engineering activities.

ECRI Institute was selected by the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) to determine if it is feasible and desirable to develop benchmarks for the activities of hospital-based clinical engineering (CE) departments. The ultimate goal of the project is to enable departments from different institutions to compare their performance based on a representative set of indicators (RSI).

The study included a review of benchmarking literature, field interviews, and an analysis of ECRI Institutes benchmarking projects, which included a series of structured interviews with more than 30 healthcare executives whose job descriptions ranged from CE managers to hospital CEOs. Senior hospital managers focused on financial aspects of CE departments and want an annual analysis of the value received for the funds expended. On the other hand, CE department directors want superiors to interpret the CE department value by comparing to other peer group institutions.

AAMI has been exploring ways to evaluate CE departments using indicators for many years. In 1997 Ted Cohen proposed three indicators for repair and maintenance services: ratio of service cost to acquisition cost, repair requests completed per device, and average repair turnaround time. The ratio of service cost to acquisition cost has become widely cited in literature and is used by many third-party service organizations and some CE departments to benchmark their programs.