Right-sizing clinical education.

Frequently, education is prime when hospital administration is seeking opportunities to reduce the budget. Our hospital region faced that dilemma. This article discusses how our facility used management engineering to determine the number of education hours for each unit, based on specific negotiated criteria developed by a collaborative group, to answer the question "How many staff can one educator represent?"

Feasibility of linking external valuation sources to bedside-caregiver activities in interdisciplinary patient care standards.

Establishing accurate and standardized values for bedside-care activities is crucial to the development of resource utilization prediction and management systems. We describe our experience of associating a representative sample of activities extracted from interdisciplinary patient care standards developed at Intermountain Healthcare with an external database of time & motion valued actions. The association exercise revealed important considerations for the development of a standard methodology for linking activities to future national or international standardized value units.