Radiology department management system: technologists' costs.

We developed a series of management reports to compare actual costs against expected costs for radiology departments on a more detailed level than previously available. We first developed labor standards for the most commonly employed diagnostic examinations and showed that increased patient complexity (resulting from, for example, immobility, precautions status, etc.) also increased the examination times up to 2.6-fold compared with the time required for average patients. Using labor standards and budgeted and actual volumes of average and complex patients, we calculated four types of variances: volume variance, examination mix variance, patient complexity variance, and technologist efficiency variance. Monitoring the technologist efficiency variance over time could be one key piece of information for improving departmental productivity.