Benchmarking Performance Improvement Indicators for the Clinical Engineering Department

Abstract

Performance measurement and Benchmarking have become an integral component of all sectors and the Clinical Engineering (CE) department can not be overlooked. The optimum goal of Benchmarking Performance indicators in the CE department is to continuously strive to improve the quality of the CE department's services upstream, which will consequently lead to a better financial performance downstream. To be successful in this work, I identified mainstream performance indicators essential in making the adjustments needed for improvement of the department's performance. As to the selection of these indicators, an in-depth survey was sent out to over sixty CE directors. The response was analyzed to reveal the top three mainstream performance indicators to be: (a) CE service cost as a percentage of CE inventory value; (b) Total number of preventive maintenance (PMs) completed per month versus total number of PMs scheduled in a month; (c) CE service cost over the last fiscal year versus the total productive (worked) staff hours in that fiscal year. Upon further mathematical analysis of CE department data from the various CE directors, this work would establish substantive Benchmarks that could be used to measure the CE department's performance. Also, this thesis is in the process of developing a software program (Structured Query Language, Macros, etc.) that would extract data from the department's database and use this data to evaluate the performance of the department. I can envisage this work providing valuable indicator figures for continuous performance optimization of CE services.