Healthcare Performance Management is not a new subject. But when hospitals become more serious towards caring their patients and the quality of the treatment they deliver to their patients; they start searching within their infrastructure for the answers to their challenges.

Healthcare Performance Management is not a new subject. But when hospitals become more serious towards caring their patients and the quality of the treatment they deliver to their patients; they start searching within their infrastructure for the answers to their challenges. The process of performance management poses quite a few operational challenges for hospitals. As a part of performance accreditation process, they have to provide relevant data to the accreditation authorities in a timely manner and in the prescribed format. This process may prove difficult or simplified; depending on the extent to which the hospitals are well equipped in terms of their infrastructure, internal processes and competency of people. Collating data across hospital’s ICT infrastructure every month or quarter for accreditation process can be another challenge.

Most of the hospitals have semi-automated environments where partial data is available right within the ICT system whereas the rest is available in hand written form or stored in local computers or isolated systems. So security of this data remains another challenge.

There is a need to establish a single source of trusted, secured and authentic database that can be used for measuring all identified metrics as a part of Accreditation process. This is yet another challenge faced by ICT department of the Hospital. Metric is the smallest measurable quark in the system whereas KPIs are derived from metric(s). While those are operational aspects / challenges; business needs to understand, why they really need those metrics and KPIs to be measured. Typically, the metrics participate in the cause-and-effect strategy model of the business in order to get better visibility of what is happening why. This helps in not only deriving the action items but also in assigning those action items to the concerns responsible. This ‘close loop system’ will help hospitals in realizing the performance improvements. Majority of the cases, hospitals deploy conventional analytical tools and fail to achieve the desired outcomes expected by the stakeholders and/or accreditation authorities. We are already witnessing overly optimized reports in this domain from analysts. On one hand hospitals are showcasing lot of certifications while on the other hand there is no downfall in the number of patients complaining about the quality of the medical treatment they received or face the consequences of erroneous treatments they received.

Identifying metrics is more of an art than science. Hospitals can seek help of the domain experts / SME-Subject Matter Experts / accreditation authorities for the purpose. Most of the leading hospitals initially start by identifying metrics that are of monitoring* type. Over a period of time (generally a year or so; but subject to the maturity of their internal processes) they convert these metrics to performance* metrics with well-defined target / baseline values. The accreditation authorities may help them in supplying ‘benchmarked’ values of target / baseline for the identified metrics. Every metric has certain periodicity / frequency(*) and it is imperative to make the relevant data available at that frequency. Some hospitals also have a web-based system deployed wherein it is possible for the responsible medical practitioners/ executives to enter the relevant data manually for the metrics assigned to them.

The performance management system then automatically processes the data made available in the single source of secured and authentic database and keeps the same ready for future analysis and reporting.

In a nut-shell, hospitals have to automate their process of data collection in a systematic and structured manner while they embark journey of managing their performance. In the next part of my article, I will state various phases before they can actually start ‘managing’ their performance.

*These are few of the properties of the metric. A metric typically has multiple properties, depending on the maturity of the performance management system.