I recently had an opportunity to present to HFMA members in Tennessee on the topic of benchmarking and shared how one of our clients leveraged it to drive meaningful performance improvement for hospitals and health systems. To achieve that level of improvement, many variables must be in place.

If you’re new to hospital benchmarking (clinical, operational or both), I believe success is predicated on a few key things.

1. Be sure you have the right benchmarking solution which delivers accurate and trustworthy data. If your solution’s methodology and mapping is in a “black box,” you may encounter internal resistance which will block progress at the onset of your efforts to improve.
2. Make using the data and the tools easy. The benchmarking data should be translated into actionable priorities for your teams. Data is fine but delivering information which guides your teams to focus, prioritize and act is what you need to move the needle on performance. This requires a precise and transparent peer group and access to colleagues at the peer organizations who have found strong or best practices.
3. Establish the right structure. Identify executive sponsors – preferably someone in the C-suite – and define priorities. This is critical for establishing a data-driven culture for performance improvement.
4. Provide helpful resources so that teams across your organization are engaged to take action on the areas that need improvement. Limit the number of concurrent priorities so you can focus and optimize progress.
5. Measure and communicate. Establish your benchmarking data as the measuring stick for progress, and commit to regular reporting to and from executives and other team members. And above all, identify process and outcome metrics to help you determine if you are progressing favorably in between benchmarking measurement cycles.

Even if you’ve been benchmarking for a while, I’d challenge you to take a hard look at your ability to access the data and use it to identify opportunities and drive engagement internally. When done right, hospital benchmarking and performance improvement reveals where to focus first and helps you uncover opportunities hidden in long-established processes throughout the organization. We see tremendous results at the hospital and system-levels for those organizations trying to centralize services.

My HFMA presentation included an example of a health system which generated a $150 million reduction since 2012. If you’d like to download a copy of the HFMA presentation, click here.

On Wednesday, June 14, (2-3pm CT, 3pm-4pm EDT) OSF Healthcare will present an HFMA session on leveraging benchmarking to create cost savings opportunities. To register, visit http://www.hfma.org/Content.aspx?id=53750.