The News Room

Heidi Horn always knew that her clinical engineering department was top-notch in many areas. She just didn’t have a way to prove it.

Now, with AAMI’s Benchmarking Solution, Horn has been able to measure her department’s practices, policies, and procedures against others and monitor their progress throughout the year. She also has used the online tool to justify staffing levels and expenses to administrators.

AAMI’s Benchmarking Solution launched just 10 months ago. But already  hospital subscribers from around the world have used the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation’s (AAMI) benchmarking tool to help measure staffing levels, budgeting levels for maintenance and training and other factors, scheduled inspections, and several other important issues.

Horn oversees the system-wide clinical engineering department for SSM Integrated Health Technologies—the technology arm of SSM Health Care (SSMHC). SSMHC is a large health network with 15 hospitals in Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin and Oklahoma. The department must abide by benchmarking and data goals just like other departments in the system. “What we have always struggled with in clinical engineering is we didn’t have anything to benchmark against,” she says.

By using AAMI’s Benchmarking Solution, Horn has been able to compare bed counts, staffing levels, and other factors with similar-size hospital systems. “This has provided us with good data to show the administration that this is how the industry is looking,” Horn says.

She also distributed the benchmarking results in a newsletter to her clinical engineering department.

“We have, like all support departments, faced economic bad times and we must look at the staffing model and make sure we staff appropriately,” Horn says. “AAMI’s Benchmarking Solution gave us the information we need to prove to administration that we are performing exceptionally and we are where we need to be on expenses and staffing.”

The benchmarking data also helped Greg Duncan, chief biomedical engineer at Children's Hospital of Oakland, CA, get a recommendation from his hospital’s position control committee for an additional biomedical equipment technician (BMET). “I presented the Cost of Service Ratio as a preferred metric/model for measuring and managing the business of Biomedical Equipment maintenance, which people seemed to understand,” Duncan says. “However, it was the BMET to equipment ratio metric that seemed to open everyone’s eyes at that meeting (our ratio is about 1,500 devices per tech, which is extremely high). The committee recommended approval of the position and it is now waiting final budgetary approval.”

Steven Matowik, biomedical services supervisor for Yuma Medical Center in Yuma, AZ, plans to use AAMI’s Benchmarking Solution to help justify staffing levels. “That has always been in the ether,” Matowik says, referring to the number of BMETs a hospital requires. “The old calculation was how much time does it take to do preventive maintenance or repair and how many man hours that you have.”

When Matowik delves into the benchmarking data, he plans to use its staffing metrics. “The benchmarking data gives you something you can tell administration that nationwide this is the staffing level,” Matowik says

Founded in 1967, the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) is a nonprofit organization representing a unique alliance of nearly 6,000 members from around the world united by one mission — to increase the understanding and beneficial use of medical instrumentation through effective standards and educational programs, and publications.