Are productivity and cost-effectiveness comparisons between in-house clinical engineering departments possible or useful?

Inter-institutional comparisons of productivity and cost-effectiveness can be a valuable source of feedback to the in-house biomedical or clinical engineering services manager. But for such comparisons to be valid, all institutions must use the same criteria. As yet, there are no standard definitions for such criteria and, in most cases, the necessary data are not kept. Therefore, reliable comparisons are not possible. It is possible, however, to keep data on the variety of tasks common to all clinical engineering departments that can then be compared inter-institutionally. As task comparisons become more common, "norms" will evolve that can become standards for the profession. From there, it is a realizable step to standards that permit comparison of productivity and cost-effectiveness. A national organization, like the American Hospital Association could help by including clinical engineering data as part of their annual hospitals survey.