Healthcare Benchmarking and Quality Improvement Essays

Healthcare Benchmarking and Quality Improvement Essays Healthcare Benchmarking and Quality Improvement Paper Healthcare Benchmarking and Quality Improvement Paper Benchmarks are relevant to all health and social care settings. Therefore, the benchmarks are presented in a generic format in order that they can be used in, for example, primary, secondary and tertiary settings and with all patient and or career groups, such as in pediatric care, mental health, cancer care, surgery and medicine. It is important that those benchmarking (including patients and careers) agree on the indicators that demonstrate best practice within their area of care (UK-Department of Health). Benchmarking can be utilized in the following ways: Staff Performance: Benchmarking is often used as a method to determine performance   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  standards for office functions. Examples may be as basic as the number of calls answered, appointments made and medical records pulled. This process provides a true measure of staff productivity capabilities. Physician Performance: This benchmarking process only works if the physician being reviewed is truly interested in becoming more efficient. The basic premise is to examine what aspects of the physicians daily schedule is productive, (Time actually spent with patients) and non-productive, (time spent not rendering services to patients). The objective is to reduce non-productive time and leverage the physician’s impact. 3. Statistical Performance: This benchmarking process evaluates the practice’s statistical performance to best practice standards. Statistical comparisons include some of the following: charges, adjustments, revenues, expenses, gross/net collection percentages, and account receivable days. Performance measurement might seem strange to some organizations, but the concept of measuring and monitoring performance is not new to healthcare facilities. Requirements for public overview of healthcare facilities demand that performance data be collected, analyzed, and monitored for reimbursement, Federal and state record keeping, and accreditation purposes. As a result, most healthcare facilities already track key productivity indicators. And as state and Federal regulations require the reporting of more data, healthcare facilities will be in an even better position to assess their performance and share comparative information about performance and operations with other facilities for mutual benefit. Indeed, the greatest value to be gained from all of the performance data that healthcare facilities are gathering may well emerg from the process of comparing that data. Healthcare facilities often are quite similar in the complexity of their organizational structures, operational and clinical services, and corporate missions. That similarity will benefit healthcare facilities as they begin benchmarking efforts.     Business survival is increasingly difficult in the contemporary world. In order to survive, organizations need a commitment to excellence and a means of measuring that commitment and its results. Benchmarking provides one method for doing this. As the author describes, benchmarking is a performance improvement method that has been used for centuries. Recently, it has begun to be used in the healthcare industry where it has the potential to improve significantly the efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and quality of healthcare services.   In the contemporary world, business survival is defined as long-term economic viability achieved through excellent performance. To maintain the excellence needed for survival, however, businesss enterprises must find a way of consistently measuring and improving their performance.   Productive ideas and methods are not limited to a single industry. Cross-industry benchmarking also can offer excellent opportunities for borrowin good ideas and processes. But finding suitable partners with applicable ideas from other industries can be time consuming and costly. For example, calling a fire department to discuss the process of bringing both equipment and manpower to an emergency site can generate a number of exciting ideas, but finding the best performing fire department would take long hours of research. Because benchmarking is an ongoing effort, working first within the healthcare industry for short- and medium-term solutions will help position a facility for later cross-industry initiatives (Anderson-Miles, 1994).