How to Write a Performance Improvement Measure (PIM)
The Sustainability Roadmap is a free resource for the health care community. We are reaching out to hospital staff, health care designers, vendors, and others for help developing Roadmap tools. You can contribute by drafting or helping to develop a performance improvement measure (PIM).
What is a PIM?
A PIM is:
- A project that will improve performance in one of four aspects of facility operations—energy use, water use, waste management, or supply chain. Each PIM provides tools, case studies, and resources to help you apply the improvement at your facility.
- A stand-alone document a facility can use as a resource and guide for implementing a project—a virtual clearinghouse for information related to that improvement.
New PIMs will be continually added to the Roadmap. Users are encouraged to comment on the PIMs and suggest changes or additions based on their experience with applying them.
What is a Green Light project?
Green Light projects are PIMs that are relatively easy to implement but offer significant improvements. Strategies for successfully implementing these projects are well-documented, and their benefits are widely recognized. Green Light projects can generally be taken on without much planning because of their low cost and minimal resource requirements.
Why should you write a PIM?
Hospitals are busy places, and managers need tools and resources to help get projects done. The Roadmap was created as a repository, or clearinghouse, for great sustainability resources that are specifically applicable to hospitals. If you have expertise to share, you can help your colleagues work collectively and collaboratively to improve the sustainability performance of hospitals. Companies or individuals who contribute content to the Roadmap will be thanked and acknowledged on the Roadmap Supporters page. You can also underwrite creation of a PIM; please see the prospectus on the Supporters page.
How to Write a PIM
PIMs are written following an established outline (see the bottom of this Web page or the downloadable How to Write a PIM) so that comparable information is provided for each. The outline can generally be applied to PIMs in the categories of energy, water, waste, chemicals, and supply chain. However, not every field is relevant to every PIM. See the outline for the list of fields available and for some detail about what information each field should contain.
To the extent that vendor information is relevant, it can be included. That said, if you share information about your experiences in writing a PIM, your reporting should be vendor neutral (i.e., you can include vendor information as long as it is balanced). The Roadmap reserves the right to make editorial comments or to change the content of a PIM.
Here are some notes to help you craft a PIM:
- Choose a topic for your PIM.
- Review the list of PIMs awaiting development or suggest your own topic.
- Check with us to confirm the topic area for your PIM and for help getting started.
- Use the PIM outline (at the bottom of this Web page) to draft your PIM. The outline includes a description of the content intended for each section to help get you started.
- You may have questions, comments, or information you need to confirm. You can use the Comment function in Word (under the Review tab) to tell us about such issues or to provide additional explanation about a detail in your PIM.
- If you don’t know how to complete a field, add a note explaining your question and leave the field blank.
- You are welcome to embed hyperlinks in your PIM or to provide a Web address so we can create the hyperlink on the Roadmap. Please click and test your hyperlinks to be sure they work before submitting your file.
- Attachments:
- Send us any attachments (PDFs, Excel files, etc.) you want to link to your PIM.
- Note the file name of any document you are including when you submit your PIM. It’s helpful to connect the PIM file name with the attachment file name, for example:
- PIM file name: Establish Green Purchasing Task Force
- Attachment file name: Establish Green Purchasing Task Force – Sample Policy
- Gather information. Reach out to colleagues, group purchasing organizations, and vendors for information and resources. Search liberally, dig deep, and please cite references. Where permission to include material (e.g., pictures, text, diagrams, tables, etc.) is required, please confirm that you have received permission or note that it has been requested, along with contact information for the owner of the material. Do not assume that you are free to use material found on the Internet without asking permission.
- Connect with us if you have questions and when you are ready to submit your PIM.
Sustainability Roadmap PIM Outline
Please see How to Write a PIM for a detailed description of what to include in each section of this outline.
- Project Title
- Description
- Project Talking Points
- Triple-Bottom-Line Benefits
- Commissioning Connections
- Sample Contract Language
- How-To
- Tools/Calculators
- Case Studies
- Regulations, Codes and Standards, Policies
- Cross References: LEED and Green Guide for Health CareTM
- PIM Synergies
- Education and Training
- More Resources
- PIM Descriptors