Activity based costing applied to clinical engineering

This paper presents a study to estimate the costs of medical equipment maintenance service. The purpose was to demonstrate how Activity Based Costing (ABC) could be used to determine the costs of procedures performed at a clinical engineering department. The study was developed at the Center for Biomedical Engineering (CEB). The maintenance procedures to be costed were defined by the transitions of states recorded In the service orders. The operational costs during the year 2001 were allocated to five support cost centers and three service cost centers. The costs accumulated in the support cost centers were allocated to the service cost centers. The driver units were determined from the days spent in transitions and the number of occurrences of transitions. The total costs of the services cost centers divided by the number of driver units were the activity driver rate of each service cost center. The activity driver rate was used to assign costs to each type of service order. The results showed that the costs of service orders depend on the sequence of transitions of states.