Personnel costs account for nearly 80% of direct care expenses across Military Treatment Facilities (MTFs). However, Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) labor reporting in the Military Health System is routinely cited as an area needing improvement. Variations in FTE reporting by Functional Cost Code (FCC) hampers accurate cost, productivity, efficiency and other important MHS management metrics, and can adversely affect critical strategic initiatives and measures including Prospective Payment System (PPS) reconciliation, Business Plans execution, Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH) metrics, etc.
“FTE-Check” was designed as a proactive MTF-level personnel measurement and data quality control tool capitalizing on statistical quality control principles. It aims to identify potential FTE-related data quality issues by linking Provider FTEs by facility and product line or FCC with relative inpatient and ambulatory workload measures (RWP and RVUs) as well as ancillary weighted workload.
Interactive reports enable users to focus on a specific military Service, peer group cohort, region, or product line. In addition, all raw detailed FTE and workload data are included by 4th-level FCC and by both Parent and Child MTF to facilitate reconciliation or data validation.
Presently, FTE-Check is a Beta version relying on FY06/07 data from the EAS IV Repository and M2 and is used primarily for demonstration and feedback. Level of Effort to bring current version to current (FY10/11) is not significant. Additionally, because it is built relying on Excel and Visual Basic algorithms, it can be easily modified to include additional information supporting PCMH evaluation as well as greater personnel detail from DMHRSi.