title: Mission-based budgeting for education: ready for prime time?
abstract: Mission-based budgeting has been touted as the preferred method of assessing and assigning departmental budgets in academic medical centers. Mission-based budgeting in its simplest form is a methodology that allows an institution's finance department to align costs with actual activities (typically clinical care, administration, research, and teaching). Despite its intuitive appeal, a minority of the academic medical centers across the country have embraced it. Mount Sinai School of Medicine was among the first to incorporate this approach, and we have almost a decade of experience with its risks and benefits. This article focuses on the education component of mission-based budgeting. We review all aspects of mission-based budgeting, including (1) the many variables that must be factored into a metric and how those variables differ among institutions, (2) the metric itself and how it reflects institutional philosophy, (3) the impact of mission-based budgeting on faculty and chairs of departments, (4) existing processes that ensure the quality, reliability, and validity of the different mission-based budgeting systems, and (5) a comparative perspective.
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Education, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, NY, USA. michelle.sainte@mssm.edu
authors.forename: Michelle
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Sainté
authors.forename: Steven L
authors.initials: SL
authors.lastname: Kanter
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Muller
mesh_terms: D000046:Academic Medical Centers / Q000191:economics*; D002017:Budgets / Q000379:methods*; D004501:Education, Medical / Q000191:economics*; D017598:Efficiency, Organizational / Q000191:economics; D005376:Financial Management / Q000191:economics; D006801:Humans; D013663:Teaching / Q000191:economics*; D014481:United States