The Decomposition of Return on Investment for Forensic Laboratories

For forensic laboratories, a detailed understanding of return on investment (ROI) is necessary for routine assessment, consideration of new legislative alternatives, and cost-benefit analysis for decision making. Converting performance data to ratio measures provides useful comparisons between an individual laboratory and the standards for excellence for the industry; these measures also permit an evaluation across time. Unfortunately, these same ROI measures are subject to abuse when overemphasis on a single measure leads to unintended consequences. In this paper, the ROI measure is broken down into various parts that can be tracked on a regular basis to reveal how a laboratory achieves its results. The tradeoffs between return and risk, efficiency, analytical process, and market conditions are outlined. The end product is a series of easily monitored metrics that a laboratory director may examine on a regular basis for continuous improvement.