What type of analysis involves reviewing the inner workings of the healthcare organization to determine strengths and weaknesses of the business practice and processes?

What type of analysis involves reviewing the inner workings of the healthcare organization to determine strengths and weaknesses of the business practice and processes?

Benchmarking is the competitive edge that allows organizations to adapt, grow, and thrive through change. Benchmarking is the process of measuring key business metrics and practices and comparing them—within business areas or against a competitor, industry peers, or other companies around the world—to understand how and where the organization needs to change in order to improve performance. There are four main types of benchmarking: internal, external, performance, and practice.

1. Performance benchmarking involves gathering and comparing quantitative data (i.e., measures or key performance indicators). Performance benchmarking is usually the first step organizations take to identify performance gaps.

What you need: Standard measures and/or KPIs and a means of extracting, collecting, and analyzing that data. 

What you get: Data that informs decision making. This form of benchmarking is usually the first step organizations take to identify performance gaps. 

2. Practice benchmarking involves gathering and comparing qualitative information about how an activity is conducted through people, processes, and technology. 

What you need: A standard approach to gather and compare qualitative information such as process mapping.

What you get: Insight into where and how performance gaps occur and best practices that the organization can apply to other areas.

3. Internal benchmarking compares metrics (performance benchmarking) and/or practices (practice benchmarking) from different units, product lines, departments, programs, geographies, etc., within the organization. 

What you need: At least two areas within the organization that have shared metrics and/or practices. 

What you get: Internal benchmarking is a good starting point to understand the current standard of business performance. Sustained internal benchmarking applies mainly to large organizations where certain areas of the business are more efficient than others.

4. External benchmarking compares metrics and/or practices of one organization to one or many others. 

What you need: For custom benchmarking, you need one or more organizations to agree to participate. You may also need a third party to facilitate data collection. This approach can be highly valuable but often requires significant time and effort. That’s why organizations engage with groups like APQC, which offers more than 3,300 measures you can use to compare performance to organizations worldwide and in nearly every industry.

What you get: An objective understanding of your organization’s current state, which allows you to set baselines and goals for improvement. 

Internal performance benchmarking is often a good place to start, but the biggest benefit comes from external benchmarking that examines both performance and practice. You get maximum impact when you look at the world beyond your own desk, department, and company. APQC members can use Benchmarks on Demand tool and find best practices in our Resource Library. 

Ultimately, benchmarking is about being humble enough to admit that others are better at something and being wise enough to learn how match—or even surpass—them at it. You’ll never gain that knowledge if you don’t look at the world beyond your own office, department, or company. In the words of Peter Drucker, “What a business needs most for its decisions—especially its strategic ones—are data about what goes on outside it. Only outside a business are there results, opportunities, and threats.”  

Get started today with APQC’s Benchmarking Basics Collection. This collection contains the main items you will need to start a benchmarking initiative including templates, tools, a glossary, APQC's Process Classification Framework and Benchmarking Code of Conduct, and articles that explain the steps required for successful benchmarking. 
 

Measures used to assess and compare the quality of health care organizations are classified as either a structure, process, or outcome measure. Known as the Donabedian model, this classification system was named after the physician and researcher who formulated it.

Structural Measures

Structural measures give consumers a sense of a health care provider’s capacity, systems, and processes to provide high-quality care. For example:

  • Whether the health care organization uses electronic medical records or medication order entry systems.
  • The number or proportion of board-certified physicians.
  • The ratio of providers to patients.

Process Measures

Process measures indicate what a provider does to maintain or improve health, either for healthy people or for those diagnosed with a health care condition. These measures typically reflect generally accepted recommendations for clinical practice. For example:

  • The percentage of people receiving preventive services (such as mammograms or immunizations).
  • The percentage of people with diabetes who had their blood sugar tested and controlled.

Process measures can inform consumers about medical care they may expect to receive for a given condition or disease, and can contribute toward improving health outcomes. The majority of health care quality measures used for public reporting are process measures.

Outcome Measures

Outcome measures reflect the impact of the health care service or intervention on the health status of patients. For example:

  • The percentage of patients who died as a result of surgery (surgical mortality rates).
  • The rate of surgical complications or hospital-acquired infections.

Outcome measures may seem to represent the “gold standard” in measuring quality, but an outcome is the result of numerous factors, many beyond providers’ control. Risk-adjustment methods—mathematical models that correct for differing characteristics within a population, such as patient health status—can help account for these factors. However, the science of risk adjustment is still evolving. Experts acknowledge that better risk-adjustment methods are needed to minimize the reporting of misleading or even inaccurate information about health care quality.


Also in "Select Measures to Report"

Page last reviewed July 2015

Page originally created February 2015

Internet Citation: Types of Health Care Quality Measures. Content last reviewed July 2015. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Rockville, MD.
https://www.ahrq.gov/talkingquality/measures/types.html

What type of analysis involves reviewing the inner workings of the healthcare organization to determine strengths and weaknesses of the business practice and processes?

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