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 first part of the article discussed about the importance of having a single source of trusted, secured and authentic database that can be used for measuring all identified metrics as a part of Accreditation process. In reality, hospitals should think beyond measuring metrics; which is the bottom line. As they say…unless you measure it you cannot improve it. The investment done in this process is worth. It not only helps in understanding ‘where we stand today’ but also helps in achieving the Vision of hospital.

The very first step towards managing performance is to stop ‘Eating Strategy over Lunch’! This may call for a ‘cultural change within’ and the top management must drive this, whole heartedly. Forming the strategy planning and execution team with identified, responsible and accountable team members should prove to be a good kick-start. And as they say… Without Strategy execution is aimless; without execution strategy is useless.

Your journey starts from measuring the performance to managing it; and then from managing to optimizing the same. Though hospital is not in a true sense a pure ‘business’ and its very Mission is to provide best service to human/ patients; it is worth to identify and define Business Objectives very clearly. By virtue of establishing ‘relationship’ among those Business Objectives will help in forming a ‘blue print’ of strategy. This is called as the Cause-and-effect model (Dr.Kaplan and Dr.Norton in 1993). Top management should allocate appropriate budget for achieving these Objectives.

Now identify Business Goals that are SMART (Small, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time bound) and form a recipe that clearly defines how to measure those. Link these Business Goals (KPIs) to their respective Business Objectives. This will help hospitals in synergizing all functions within the hospital and align them to their Vision. This would reflect strategic performance of the hospital.

When hospital starts taking initiatives / execute projects (in order to achieve their Objectives); there would be Business Risks associated which are to be identified and measured/ audited along the way. This would reflect the tactical performance of the hospital.

Identify metrics that would contribute to the respective Business Goals / KPIs. The metrics at the bottom would reflect operational performance of the hospital. The figure at the start of the article reflects the things that we just discussed.

This methodology when implemented and executed continuously; will surely help businesses / hospitals in optimizing their performance and will ultimately help them in looking beyond simply measuring the metrics.