Establishing Performance Measurements For A Medical Practice
Performance measurement metrics give you statistics you can transform into practice goals, so these measurements should always be set with the intention to identify opportunities for improving your patients’ care. They typically provide insight into high-level patterns and outcomes of care across many dimensions of quality within your organization.
Performance measures are not the same as quality measures — those serve the purpose of accelerating internal clinical improvement. (Keep an eye out for our upcoming article on quality measures for medical practices!) The performance measurements we’ll be covering today are focused on external growth — getting new patients and increasing patient satisfaction.
How To Establish A Performance Measurement Framework For Your Medical Practice
Sometimes, it’s hard to quantify patient care. Brainstorming sessions with your team as a way to engage them with the process will be a great way to increase the overall success of your practice. If they are part of its development, it gives your team the opportunity to make a difference!
Your receptionists, assistants, and technologists directly lend to patient satisfaction or disappointment, so starting with big picture practice goals as a team is the best way to establish a framework for measuring performance goals.
Performance measures should share some general attributes:
- Focused on improving important processes and outcomes of care that matter to your patients.
- Are within the reasonable control of the folks being measured.
That means, that if you have a performance measure that doesn’t affect your patients’ care, but rather your internal systems — it likely isn’t a good metric. Likewise, if the goal is out of your people’s reasonable control, like having a goal that contradicts or undermines a guideline in an OSHA regulation, it isn’t a good measurement. Your practice should also make certain that the proposed performance metrics are not only attainable but realistic.
A Simple Definition.
Performance measurement analyzes the success of your team’s efforts by comparing what actually happened to what was planned or intended. Performance measurement asks: “is progress being made toward our desired goals?”
How Do Other Performance Assessment Activities Relate To Performance Measurement?
Performance management is what you do with the information you've developed from measuring performance. Performance managing means using performance measurement information to manage your practices’ processes.
“Performance measurement is needed as a management tool to clarify goals,
document the contribution toward achieving those goals, and document the benefits received from the investment in each program.”
— U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Okay, so what are good Performance Measurements?
Well, you have to decide what level of performance defines success at your practice.
This sounds simple, but not setting a common understanding in your practice of what defines success in your practice will undermine all of your good intentions for performance measurement. Decide what an acceptable measurement result is, and you’ll be able to interpret what change means.
Need more help?
Done Desk contains many performance documents in our document library. From Employee Review Packets to Employee Performance Self Review to assist your employee in reviewing their own performance.
Additionally, some coaching in HR can help your whole practice get on the same page and grow together — giving you the extra discipline you’ve been waiting for to deliver quality healthcare and produce consistent results.