Benchmarking and Beyond

The Key to Hospital Efficiency Improvement

Benchmarking results in a lot of new insights and perspectives. But when your hospital is faced with fundamental challenges such as the need to achieve a step in performance or to improve the effectiveness of its operations you face a number of challenges.

Where is improvement really possible?
How big is the improvement potential?
How do you demonstrate the value that the transformation will bring to the business and that justifies the investment in the change program?
Finally, how do you build consensus around the way forward within the executives and top-management as well as the wider organization?

Successful hospitals don’t only know about their performance, but they capitalize on their opportunities to improve.

With Hospital Benchmarking you will be able to identify departments with improvement potential. Most clients take the following four steps:

Measure their performance, compare it to peer hospitals and identify the most inefficient departments
Capitalize on inefficiencies by identifying how the improvement potential can be reached
Intervent and redesign clinical pathways
Monitor and achieve the next level of performance

Step 1: Measure & Benchmark

A task force will be needed to utilize the Hospital Productivity Benchmark results to the best. The team usually consist of a member of the Board of Directors, the HR manager, Manager Planning & Control and an external consultant.
Presentation of methodology to management team and head of departments. During this task force presentation the approach of Hospital Productivity Benchmark is explained and further actions are agreed on with a timeline. In most cases our clients decide not to show the results yet on departmental level, only show the big lines. This is to avoid the ‘naming and shaming’ before discussions with individual departments take place.
Selection of 20 departments for further analysis. These are mostly the department with the most optimizing potential. However, some departments are ‘known to be different’, so they can be skipped. For example: At the moment of implementing a new HIS, it is not obvious to analyze the ICT department. Or, there might be managerial agreement to spend more resources on a known competence and research centre.
Achieve common understanding by discussing the input parameters and results with the selected 20 departments. Department heads can name special circumstances that explain differences.
Contacting peer hospitals proves to be very useful. Upon request, Hospital Benchmark searches for hospitals doing better at the selected departments. Department heads can organize site visits between them, allowing better practices to be shared. It also achieves a sense of ‘it can be done’, very important for acceptance of the improvement targets.

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Successful Hospital Managers know that having performed an intervention is not sufficient to stay effective. They know that performance improvement is a continuous process. It requires a continuous monitoring and improvement of its performance. With Hospital Productivity Benchmark and Hospital Quality Benchmark you can the monitor your performance and quality over time, compared to peers and mirrored on your strategic goals.

Step 2: Capitalize on inefficiencies

Efficiency clinics with our team of consultants normally take a day and generate ‘mini business cases’. In these one page reports, the participants suggest process changes that results in reaching the identified improvement (mostly expressed in full time equivalent savings target). Requirements will be set (investments, cooperation from other departments, management). Suggested better process organization can be learned by peer site visits, known best practices, or can be the result of a workshop with the employees of the department.
Deciding on process changes to be implemented is a job of the hospital management. A list of mini business cases will be presented by the task force to the board of directors.

Step 3: Intervent & Redesign clinical pathways

The implementation phase requires decisions: which departments can make their own change happen and where do we need to support with external change managers? New work methods need to be developed, and people need to be coached through changes.

Step 4: Monitor

Monitoring of results shows, if you are really going into the right direction. Departments that succeed can see their result and figure a showcase to others to follow. It closes your learning cycle. As the benchmark develops over time, new departments will pop up that require improvement. Continuous efficiency monitoring will bring your hospital to the next level of performance.

Our experience is that, after analysis, around 70% of the identified potential is ‘true’. The other 30% can be explained by special functions of hospitals, big running projects, availability constraints etc. From the 70% remaining, roughly one third is hard to get because it requires major investments in ICT or infrastructure. But 70% (or about half of the identified potential) can be easily improved in short term, just by minor investments in education, process flow or planning.

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