ViewPoints Blog

Wednesday, June 14, 2017 – 3 pm EDT

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.

Can you remember the last time you evaluated your hospital’s benchmarking tool? Many hospitals and health systems use the same performance management tool for a very long time, trusting that its capabilities adequately meet their organizational needs. And that’s just what some of the biggest hospital benchmarking vendors want you to believe, that the size of their database and their longevity in the market cements their value.

Increasing pressure on hospital finances, coupled with the unknown future of reimbursement, is driving many healthcare facilities to aggressively focus on identifying cost-savings opportunities. To stay ahead of those pressures and address challenges head on, organizations are looking at new ways to pursue performance improvement (PI) and find efficiencies throughout their systems. 

As the healthcare industry faces an uncertain future, most providers will tackle a reinforced imperative for efficient and effective performance as they prepare for an overall tightening of operating margins. As the industry works to address the realities and the uncertainties of the regulatory and market changes ahead, the success of their performance initiatives is ever more critical.

I’m often asked to identify the single biggest factor that derails performance benchmarking initiatives. The list of potential culprits can be quite extensive

Over the course of my career, I have had an opportunity to speak with a lot of leadership teams at hospitals and health systems about their efforts to continuously drive and inspire performance improvements. I’ve probed, had great conversations and gathered their thoughts about what it takes to ensure meaningful success.

As we look across the healthcare landscape at the end of 2015, two questions rise prominently to the top; (1) how will hospitals offset declining reimbursements and (2) how can hospitals smoothly transition to value-based models?