A major part of the work being done, for the health care system I work in, to improve operationally relies heavily on benchmarking. I am not going to try and explain the detailed process but it definitely consumes a lot of the time I spend at work in some fashion. Dating back a decade or so, the organization decided that in order to compete with other hospitals across the country it would be necessary to compare operating statistics, focusing primarily on productivity. The goal was simple enough: improve your productivity numbers and your costs would decrease. Productivity in this case referred to worked hours per unit of service, which was a ratio that determined in essence the amount of work that was paid for to complete a volume of service that represented roughly 80% of the value added work they did. For example on nursing units the service is patient days.
This system has been in place for at least a better part of the last decade and has evolved over time to accommodate more departments and different services. However, as health care is changing at an ever rapid pace, is benchmarking to a national database the best way to continually improve an organization to keep up with the changing landscape? I will go on record as to say it is not the best practice and improvements can be made without comparing nationally. There are several issues that I would like to address.
Issue Number 1. Substantial Time Involved in Creating Benchmarks.
- Without going into details into what benchmarking entails where I work, it involves substantial man hours to update and maintain the benchmarks. It at a high level requires obtaining data, submitting it, finding the appropriate compare groups in the database, and then setting targets for hundreds of hospital departments. The targets are then used to drive improvement, however the sheer volume of time for the task of creating and maintaining these benchmarks puts limits on the time that can be spent actually improving a department.
industrial engineers focused on improving healthcare
