The Benefits and Obstacles of Benchmarking the Healthcare System in the United States

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The Benefits and Obstacles of Benchmarking the Healthcare System in the United States
Any successful organization has a system through which it measures its performance and implements measures to continuously improve its quality. The United States healthcare quality system is one of the programs that should be monitored for the delivery of quality services. The exercise should be done to identify the loopholes that may impede service delivery and to take advantage of the available opportunities. There are several ways to track a program’s success metrics based on one’s needs and the time frame that the individual is seeking to monitor. Notable techniques include the use of benchmarking, scorecards, dashboard, value chain, and implementation. The choice of the tool to use depends on what one is look for. More importantly, the choice depends on the type of metrics being tracked and the goals associated with tracking this information.
US Healthcare Quality Improvement
The roots of quality improvement in the United States healthcare sector can be traced back to the 19th century prominent figures, such as Ignaz Semmelweis, who is remembered for his role in championing the importance of hand washing in medical care. Another notable figure is Florence Nightingale, an English nurse who established a link between high death rates and poor living conditions among soldiers treated at army hospitals (Marjoua & Kevin. There is also Ernest Codmans, a surgeon, who instigated the creation of hospital standards and emphasized on strategies to evaluate healthcare outcomes. The efforts of these prominent people have steered the country’s quality system to great levels. The modern quality movement has since evolved to include a variety of stakeholders, a range of approaches, and a unique set of goals all designed to enhance the patient outcome.
There have been several notable improvements in healthcare quality over the last half a century. A significant number of these efforts were contributed by the academic health quality improvement. The entire process began with a series of articles that began highlighting the deficiencies in healthcare delivery. Consequently, a series of quality monitoring models came up to help monitor service delivery and help improve the quality of organizations. These tools assessed the service delivery in terms of the objectives, measures, initiatives, and action items. Others concentrated on assessing the overall efficiency of an organization or the services rendered. Assessing the current performance of the country’s healthcare sector using the different tools of quality monitoring can help identify gaps that still exist and advance approaches that can help seal those gaps.
Benchmarking
Benchmarking comes across as a process of comparing an organization’s performance to the performance of another similar entity. This technique serves as a short cut to the performance assessment as it does not focus on unveiling new ways of doing things or reinventing practices that are already in use by other entities. Its main objective is to uncover best practices and adopt them. Best practices refers to the approaches that have been proven to result in better outcomes compared to others. Benchmarking does not only have to be external, the organization can also conduct it internally. In this approach, the organization can compare its interdepartmental performance by either assessing the performance of one department against the other or comparing the historical performance of a department. Most organizations use the benchmarking approach to compare their performance against the industry average or against the top performers.
Benchmarking in the Healthcare Sector
In the healthcare settings, benchmarking helps to improve efficiency, quality of care, patient safety, and patient satisfaction. The process entails assessment of the standards, best practices, and the evaluation of the evidence-based practices, which is then followed by identification of the potential areas of improvement. The healthcare sector has applied benchmarking for several years to enhance their processes and outcomes. For example, in 1994, the US Veterans Affairs department used benchmarking to establish an approach of assessing quality in their surgical patient outcomes. The Institute of Medicine used the approach in 1999 to realize that quality varied significantly across the healthcare system and noted that there were rampant errors across all healthcare venues. The technique can gauge the performance of the employees by giving them individual goals to help in achieving the larger organizational goals. Similarly, in the event that new practices are implemented, the management must realize ways to assess progress to determine whether the new benchmark has been achieved.
Benefits of Benchmarking the US Health System
One of the benefits of using this approach to gauge the US system’s healthcare sector is that it provides the easiest to gauge the company’s performance. For example, measuring its performance compared to the last year can help predict whether it is improving or not. Secondly, the use of internal benchmarking technique will also help the healthcare sector to repurpose solutions or ideas without investing a lot of resources towards research and development. Thirdly, it can help the sector undertake budget projections on what it needs to do to achieve its goals.
Obstacles to Benchmarking
The main obstacle towards effective benchmarking of the US healthcare sector lies in the complex nature of the system. The US healthcare system cannot be directly compared to the healthcare system of any other country because of the variations in structures and operations. Consequently, it is difficult to accurately benchmark the system against any other system (Lapão). Another obstacle has to do with the socio-technical factors or fit factors, which involve the design and deployment of health information systems. Lack of consideration of such systems may lead to significant implementation challenges.
Balanced Scorecard Criteria
Scorecards were designed to communicate an organization’s goals to its stakeholders and to create a plan for attaining these goals. This approach may be perceived as a pyramid with the highest point, the pinnacle, being the financial perspective of the business, which defines the sector’s goals of maximizing its value. As one progresses downwards, they have to answer the question of value creation, which culminates in the normal definition of quality, which is judged by the customer’s satisfaction levels (Ross). Therefore, the second-highest level on the pyramid is the customer perspective, whose goal is to satisfy the customer, with the ultimate goal being satisfying the customer loyalty. Customers who believe that they are getting value for their money will remain loyal to the system. Kaplan established three paths that can serve as metrics to assess customer satisfaction: operational excellence, customer intimacy, and product leadership.
Dashboard Metrics
Dashboards are also performance analytic tools that focus on lower levels of an organization or a program’s activities, such as the departmental activities or a single process. The main advantage of these tools is that they rely on departmental data, which is readily available and easy to understand. In addition, they work by tracking activities that employees do on a daily basis. In the event that the employees play a role in developing the departmental goals and the dashboard measures, then the process may boost staff motivation and commitment towards achieving their targets. The dashboards serve two purposes, which is reporting and management. The dashboard designed for reporting purposes often entail aggregate data collected over a specific period and are meant to influence future behavior. In the event that productivity reduces because of a reduction in cases, then the staff may be reduced. On the contrary, i...