Productivity: standard terminology and definitions.

There exists a need for a standard set of definitions to describe and measure the tasks performed by the staffs of clinical engineering departments. Too often, in discussions and publications on productivity, inconsistencies exist that make comparisons difficult between the author's methodology and that used by readers or other authors. To avoid this, there needs to be uniformity in the classification of which tasks are productive and the way those tasks are documented, tabulated, and reported. This paper presents some concepts from industrial engineering, as well as descriptions of staff labor and financial terms. Definitions for productivity and other measures of departmental performance are also developed.