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U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
The Division of Planning, Evaluation, and Research

Facility Planning and Tools

Staff in the Division of Planning, Evaluation, and Research work with area planners and staff from the Office of Environmental Health and Engineering Division of Facility and Construction Planning and the Office of Clinical and Preventive Services to develop proposals for health facilities.

IHS Resources Requirements Methodology

The Indian Health Service (IHS) Resources Requirements Methodology (RRM) is a system designed to project the staffing needs for a specific facility or primary service area. It is available in a computer spread sheet program to assist with the preparation of staffing estimates. To use the RRM, essential workload information is gathered and entered into the worksheets where it serves as the driving variables for each discipline. The goal of RRM is to help insure that IHS provides appropriate, reasonable and consistent staffing information to Congress and Tribes. The main purpose of the RRM model is to project staffing that will be used in the development of Program Justification Documents (PJD), Project Summary Documents (PSD) or tribal requests for technical assistance in the submittal of HUD BLOCK Grant Proposals. Experts in the various disciplines compared staffing ratios with industrial standards in developing the formulas for the program, as well as benchmark information from existing IHS facilities.

The RRM is reviewed annually and updates are made as they are needed.

  • The current approved version of the RRM is RRM2020 [EXCEL - 326 KB]

The USER Manual for RRM2007 will be useful for those people that are not familiar with the RRM program or who want to know where to get the information needed to run the program.

A Reference Manual explaining the staffing formulas for each discipline has been written so that interested parties can see how staffing projections are determined. To review the formulas click here. View discipline by clicking on it in the index. The staffing formulas have been updated a number of times since the RRM was developed. To help people understand the changes over time, a Comparison Matrix that shows the changes since 1986 was developed. The RRM versions demonstrated in the table are 6G, RRM2000, RRM2002, RRM2003, RRM2005 and RRM2007.

A commentary of the module is available for those people who want to know how the module was developed and details on the driving variable.

Health Systems Planning (HSP)

The Health Systems Planning (HSP) process is software that provides population, workload projections and space requirements for new or remodeled healthcare facilities. This information is of special interest to planners and some of it is needed to use the RRM. The Division of Facilities Planning and Construction provides in-depth information on the HSP.