The News Room

The Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) has released a new online benchmarking tool this month to help clinical engineering (CE) departments measure their practices, policies, and procedures against similar departments at other facilities, monitor their progress throughout the year, and share best practices.

AAMI’s Benchmarking Solution (ABS) addresses a gaping need within the field, where previous benchmarking efforts have struggled in part because responsibilities, consistent measures, and data vary significantly from one facility to the next.

AAMI’s Benchmarking Solution — developed by leading clinical engineering and software experts — will enable hospitals to gather information on nearly 120 benchmarking and best practice measures covering topics such as scheduled inspections, maintenance costs, budgets, personnel qualifications, responsibilities, customer service expectations, and a number of other issues.

The tool is available on an annual subscription basis, and AAMI is offering an introductory rate to the first 100 hospitals that subscribe to the service.

“One of the more attractive features of this tool is its ability to help identify the relevance, and importance, of particular questions,” says Ray Laxton, a leader of AAMI’s Technology Management Council (TMC), which has spearheaded the benchmarking project. “The questions that pertain to the biomed department are designed to measure various program elements within ten different facets of the overall operations: Mission and scope, human resources, financial resources, physical resources, technology planning, equipment maintenance, standards compliance, performance improvement, patient safety, and interdepartmental relations.”

In 2008, AAMI selected the Florida-based firm, NeuraMetrics Inc., to create the web-based benchmarking tool and a team of AAMI members and veteran certified clinical engineers—Matt Baretich, Frank Painter, Manny Furst, and Ted Cohen to develop the survey.

In recent months, the tool has undergone testing by both TMC members and selected hospitals around the country.

Here’s how the tool works: Hospitals that subscribe to the service are given their own “survey code” to ensure privacy. The code enables the hospital to access and respond to survey questions and review the results against aggregate benchmarking data based on surveys of other participating facilities. The survey includes questions for clinical engineering (CE) departments to answer; and a subset of questions for individuals who the CE departments reports to, and one or more clinical staff who supervise direct patient care and regularly use clinical engineering services.

“You will have clinical engineering managers answering one group of questions, and nurses answering a separate group of questions,” says Michael St. Angelo, NeuraMetrics’ president and chief executive officer.

Comparing Results

After answering the questions in the survey, CE departments can then enter the analysis section of the tool to review results and assess how their facility compares to others. Users can customize the benchmarking data, for example, to only show results from hospitals within a particular region or that are a particular size. The tool can categorize hospitals by attributes such as the number of beds or the type of facility, for example, a teaching hospital. Data in the analysis section is anonymous. Users won’t be able to see how individual hospitals perform, but can see how hospitals of a specific type perform as an entity.

“Now this is true benchmarking because you can say these are the hospitals with 400 beds and see where their strengths lie, where their weaknesses lie,” St. Angelo says. “Say I want to take a look at charts on the group of hospitals on one specific question, like staffing size or cost of doing business? You could delve into that. If the comparisons reveal areas ripe to improvement we can develop a relationship with better performing groups to efficiently and effectively respond to the challenges.”

AAMI’s Benchmarking Solution offers several options to view the survey results including straightforward survey detail and strength and weakness listings; or through a number of vivid, insightful charts such as a summary diagram, radar chart, gap analysis, and others.

Hospitals can update their own data throughout the year and access the analysis portion as often as they would like over the course of a year. The constantly updated data enables users to track their own progress over time. St. Angelo recommends that institutions update their responses to the tool quarterly to chart progress.

 “The flexibility of this tool allows for users from many different perspectives to get meaningful data, and the more diverse the input, the more meaningful the results,” Laxton says.

AAMI’s benchmarking project brought together NeuraMetrics’ extensive experience—which includes the development of online self-assessment tools for standards organizations, corporations, and consultants—with decades of clinical engineering experience offered by Cohen, Baretich, Painter, and Furst.

Richard Eliason, CBET, and a TMC member who has tested the survey, says that AAMI’s Benchmarking Solution will be a valuable tool for CE departments across the country. “AAMI’s benchmarking tool allows the clinical engineering professional to choose from a variety of clinical engineering-specific metrics.”

For more information, visit www.aami.org/abs.