The authors developed a Web-based mission-based reporting (MBR) system for their university's (UC Davis's) health system to report faculty members' activities in research and creative work, clinical service, education, and community/university service. They developed the system over several years (1998-2001) in response to a perceived need to better define faculty members' productivity for faculty development, financial management, and program assessment. The goal was to create a measurement tool that could be used by department chairs to counsel faculty on their performances. The MBR system provides measures of effort for each of the university's four missions. Departments or the school can use the output to better define expenditures and allocations of resources. The system provides both a quantitative metric of times spent on various activities within each mission, and a qualitative metric for the effort expended.
The authors report the process of developing the MBR system and making it applicable for both clinical and basic science departments, and the mixed success experienced in its implementation. The system appears to depict the activities of most faculty fairly accurately, and chairs of test departments have been generally enthusiastic. However, resistance to general implementation remains, chiefly due to concerns about reliability, validity, and time required for completing the report. The authors conclude that MBR can be useful but will require some streamlining and the elimination of other redundant reporting instruments. A well-defined purpose is required to motivate its use.
The development of mission-based management programs has been the focus of many academic medical centers. The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) has encouraged its use. The AAMC defines mission-based management as a process for organizational decision making that is mission-driven, ensures internal accountability, distributes resources in alignment with organization-wide goals, and is based on timely, open and accurate information. 1 An essential aspect of mission-based management is the ability to measure faculty and department activities that contribute to the missions of the school. This is, however, a highly controversial area, since faculty fear that poorly designed measurement systems will adversely affect their salaries, promotions, work-loads, and allocation of support. Relative-value units (RVUs), commonly used for billing, are a generally accepted method of gauging clinical productivity; however, there are only a few published methods describing productivity measures for non-clinical missions, such as education. 2-6 Like-wise, only a few of the published mission-based management systems have attempted to integrate the information from all missions for an individual faculty member. 7,8
In this article we describe our development of a mission-based reporting (MBR) system that measures faculty members' quantitative and qualitative efforts in the four missions of clinical work, research, education, and administration/community-service activities. We designed MBR as a reporting system for chairs to provide them with quantitative and qualitative information about their departments related to each of the four missions. We avoided the term mission-based management because we wanted to de-emphasize control and the negative connotations of the term management. We intended, rather, to imply that the term reporting should lead to recognition of faculty members' efforts and growth in their careers. The purpose of MBR is to provide a reporting tool for use in evaluating faculty resources and department performance, both retrospectively and prospectively. The tool helps chairs to better fulfill the missions of their departments and the school, plan for the future, and mentor and reward individual faculty members.