A Method to Create Resource Consumption Profiles for Biomedical Equipment L.N. Nascimento 1 , S.J. Calil 1 1 Department of Biomedical Engineering - School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil Abstract —Much of the raise in the healthcare sector’s ex- penditures in the last few decades has been pointed out as result of the increasing use of medical equipment, but little is actually known about the contribution of hardware and soft- ware to the cost of providing health care. This study presents a method to create resource consumption profiles within medical procedures. Based on Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing (TDABC), the method focuses on the medical procedure to evaluate the way medical equipment consumes resources in the process of delivering health care. The mapping of the resource consumption structure is gradually done, from medical proce- dure activities to resources. Because the focus is on the bio- medical equipment (BME), the method ignores human re- sources and considers only the ones directly related to the equipment (such as maintenance, accessories and disposables). The results showed that the resource consumption of equip- ment in a medical procedure depends on each specific proce- dure and on the hospital’s specific practices. Keywords— biomedical equipment, time-driven activity- based costing, resource allocation. I. INTRODUCTION At the beginning of the twentieth century, patient’s care used to be delivered at home by medical practitioners who were not expected to cure all ills but rather to provide some relief to the patient and his family. By the end of the cen- tury, medical care had long been moved to hospitals and medical centers, where medical specialists and medical equipment were concentrated [1]. Along with that change, came a rapid raise in health care expenditures. Although that raise was considered to have been driven by techno- logical innovation, not much was known in the early 1990s about the contribution of hardware and software to the costs of providing health care [2]. In recent years, some articles and papers about medical procedures’ costs have been published, but the major part of these publications was based on cost comparisons between different procedures [3, 4, 5]. Though some articles were on cost analysis of medical procedures [6, 7], none gave much detail about the way resources were consumed by medical equipment within the procedures. The objective of this article is to present a method to cre- ate resource consumption profiles for biomedical equipment (BME) within medical procedures. Having here the basic focus on a better understanding of how BME consume re- sources within medical procedures, human resources will be ignored and only the resources directly related to the equipment are considered (accessories, disposables, mainte- nance, etc.). II. MATERIALS AND METHODS Activities have been defined as “repetitive actions per- formed in the production process of an organization” [7]. Medical procedures can be considered as sequences of activities performed by medical personnel to achieve a spe- cific result related to the patient’s care. Some procedures, like organ transplantations, are very complex, take many working hours and require many types of equipment. Be- cause of this complexity and of the difficulty to allocate indirect equipment-related resources to the procedures (e.g.: equipment purchase costs, maintenance, pre-purchase plan- ning), Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing (TDABC) [8] was chosen as the basis for elaborating the resource con- sumption profile of biomedical equipment. TDABC is based on the premise that products consume activities and that activities consume resources. Also, it considers that time can be used to drive the allocation of indirectly consumed resources to the procedures. The method developed to find the medical equipment us- age profile is divided in three stages that will be described in the following subchapters. A. Stage 1 – Selection of an activity grouping system The first step for identifying the set of activities that compose a medical procedure is to choose a grouping sys- tem that logically relates the activities to the procedure itself or to its environment. Two grouping systems are proposed in this article: • Chronological grouping • Location-oriented grouping Chronological grouping: this grouping system considers a procedure as a chronological series of activities. It divides O. Dössel and W.C. Schlegel (Eds.): WC 2009, IFMBE Proceedings 25/VII, pp. 81–84, 2009. www.springerlink.com