Performance indicators play a fundamental role in the management and transformation of a hospital or laboratory. It is essential to have the correct information on hospital performance indicators , whether it is to provide information to managers for the development of teams and the guarantee of quality standards, or to executives to help them plan their investments. strategic.
Read on and learn how to create clear and simple KPI reports, and make strategic decisions based on accurate and up-to-date information.
What are hospital performance indicators?
Hospital key performance indicators ( KPIs ) are essential for any healthcare organization to track their business performance.
Whether you’re a public or private healthcare organization, you’re likely feeling the pressure of increasingly tight budgets and constantly evolving industry policies, processes and regulations.
These pressures have created a real emphasis for healthcare organizations to set clear business objectives and ensure they are achieved.
So how do you ensure that business objectives are being achieved ? Simply, by monitoring and measuring hospital performance indicators.
As they say, if you can measure it, you can improve it. In order to measure and track business goals, you’ll need some KPIs.
The data collected provides statistics that allow a healthcare organization to analyze its progress report over a given period of time.
Examples of hospital performance indicators
Below is a list of indicators for different areas of a hospital. These indicators provide quantifiable data that allows healthcare providers to understand and improve their performance.
1. Average patient waiting time
Average patient wait time is a very useful indicator for measuring and tracking business objectives around patient satisfaction and capacity management.
Patient waiting time can be calculated by determining the average time a patient must wait from entering a hospital or health clinic until they can be seen by a health professional.
2. Bed occupancy rate
The bed occupancy rate measures the proportion of hospital beds that are used at any given time. Bed occupancy is a good indicator of a hospital’s ability to provide safe and effective treatments to patients.
Therefore, bed occupancy is one of the best hospital performance indicators to measure operational and capacity objectives. Once the KPI is measured and tracked, healthcare providers can estimate whether or not more space and beds are needed.
3. Average hospital stay
As its name suggests, this hospital performance indicator I tracks the average length of stay of patients in the hospital. While this metric is very useful, it is also very general: using average hospital stay as a single KPI to track all the different stay categories at your facility will not be very useful.
Recovery from heart surgery will almost always be a longer stay than that of a cataract surgery patient. Instead, these types of hospital performance indicators should be disaggregated and used for each stay category.
After analyzing the results, healthcare facilities will be able to create a target length of stay for each category.
4. Staff-patient relationship
This indicator measures the number of personnel resources present to care for patients in a hospital during a certain period of time. This KPI for hospitals may require different ratios for different time periods, such as morning shift vs. night shift, and should be broken down accordingly.
The staff-patient ratio is a good indicator for business objectives that aim to improve the quality of patient care, as well as improve the sustainability of the workforce. A higher staff-to-patient ratio means greater ability to provide treatment and care to patients.
5. Treatment expenses
Expense per treatment measures the amount of money that a hospital or health center charges each patient for their treatment. These types of hospital performance indicators help you know the effectiveness and efficiency of your hospital’s treatments.
6. Salaries of permanent employees
The cost of salaries for permanent employees is a very important indicator that a hospital must measure. Human resources represent a large portion of most organizations’ costs, so tracking them is vital.
Although employee salaries are an expense for healthcare providers, the expense also carries an intended benefit. Working blindly to reduce this figure can also end up reducing the benefit it provides. Before creating your KPI for employee salaries, consider the impact it will have on the organization.
To measure this indicator, calculate the wages paid to all workers employed full-time during a specific time period. Salary for full-time employees is a useful KPI for business objectives around company costs and budget.
7. Time and cost of claims processing
It can be calculated by finding the average of the total time and total cash spent by a hospital on insurance claims. A low amount denotes that the hospital receives payment more quickly and that treatment costs are low.
8. Claim Denial Rate
The purpose of using this kind of hospital performance indicators is to check the efficiency of a hospital’s revenue cycle. A reduced rate shows that a hospital spends more time caring for its patients than maintaining documents or completing paperwork.
9. Patient Confidentiality
This is a very important indicator that measures the number of times that confidential or private patient information has been provided to an unauthorized third party.
Conclusion
The above list shows that in selected areas of a healthcare organization there are some measurable indicators that can be used to track the performance of the institution and its employees.
These hospital performance indicators can be monitored in a health dashboard that will help you visualize your information in real time. The advantage is that you can link data from various sources in a single virtual space, which will allow you to measure the performance of your health center.