Hospital Performance Improvement FAQ
- How do we succeed with a performance improvement plan?
- How do we reduce data preparation time?
- How do we get manager buy in for benchmarks?
- How do we prioritize key goals?
- How do we get ideas for improvement?
- How do we implement best practices?
- How do we track progress?
- How do we get the best value in clinical practice intervention?
How do I succeed with a performance improvement plan?
Prioritizing opportunity is the best way for any organization to leverage limited resources and increase patient satisfaction. To that end, HMC provides the strategies and tools to support a performance improvement master plan. One key tool, HMC Benchmarks™, enables your hospital to establish performance objectives that will yield the greatest return on your investment of time, effort, and money. HMC Benchmarks identifies the top 10 opportunities for improvement, which are easily shared with managers for implementation.
Providing support to idea generation is critical to maintain momentum. HMC’s extensive database of improvement ideas is derived from other HMC Partners – hospitals operating at actual cost positions. They are not based on averages of data collected from anonymous institutions. Moreover, HMC enables collaboration with other managers to learn how they solved problems, enabled excellence, and increased patient satisfaction. The results of these iConferences™ are populated automatically into our Best Practices™ for easy access at any time.
Managers need to architect a course of action to implement the Best Practices. To that end, the HMC Action Plans uses a menu of easy-to-understand questions to collect key information. In turn, HMC uses that data to populate your hospital’s consolidated action plan summary, which presents a snapshot of identified savings opportunities. Finally, each of the Action Plans has its own unique Trackers™ to measure progress against goals. The HMC Dashboards presents these Trackers on a single page with mission-critical measures. This enables executives to manage the team with one set of goals, simplifies the alignment of objectives, and increases accountability for idea implementation.
How do we reduce data preparation time?
Hospitals have a wealth of data contained in general ledger, clinical, and other systems throughout their various facilities. However, it can be difficult to access, scrub, and present this information in an actionable format. Without automation, the data collection and transformation processes are slow and cumbersome, and increase the time required to improve performance. To counter this, HMC specializes in collecting data quickly, scrubbing it for accuracy, and creating benchmarks that you can act on. This frees up employees from benchmark data collection, and allows them to perform more valuable tasks.
How do we get manager buy in for benchmarks?
Data integrity and transparency are critical for managers. Benchmarks must take into account such things as corporate overheads or outsourced services, as well as adjustments for inflation or regional wage differentials. Managers won’t believe in benchmarks if the data elements aren’t transparent to them, or they can’t see how these elements are relevant for their functions and comparison groups. They also lose confidence when they don’t participate in the benchmark construction.
HMC analysts not only specialize in data preparation, they collect feedback, and meet with and train your managers to understand what the information means to them in their various roles. HMC analysts’ expertise translates to confidence-building for your managers to succeed in your performance improvement campaign.
How do we prioritize key goals?
Given resource limitations, prioritizing key goals is critical for any institution in healthcare. With that in mind, HMC compares your hospital’s functional cost per unit of service with your peer comparison group at the 65th percentile – or any desired percentile target. Then HMC automatically calculates the difference in dollars and sorts the functions by excess costs and presents the information via a Web interface. This eliminates cumbersome report photocopying and distribution, and ensures the reports aren’t lost and there is accountability for action. The system enables rapid access to crucial operational views by function, service line, DRG, APRDRG, or by physician.
How do we get ideas for improvement?
HMC provides more than the benchmarks, but actionable guidance with its KnowledgeWeb tool. HMC specialists identify hospitals that have faced challenges and discover how they solved them. The analysts format the information so that it is accessible in the Best Practices section of the KnowledgeWeb database. The Best Practices are easily located and are specific to any hospital function. HMC also provides networking opportunities through its online iConferences that are frequently archived for later access. It also offers conference calls that include excellent managers nationwide who exchange ideas, solutions, and potential pitfalls.
How do we implement best practices?
Typically, implementing the action plan is a challenge, and can require time-consuming software training, or present other rollout hurdles. HMC’s streamlined approach relies on offering a simple description of what the planned change is, who will be impacted, the extent of the dollar savings, the progress benchmarks, and the deadlines. HMC provides easily accessed Action Plans for every goal.
How do we track progress?
We offer HMC Dashboards, a flexible toolset that collapses and displays data around hospital performance improvement results. The toolset extracts information from any person or IT system and integrates it with the HMC Action Plans. This allows you to track progress against specific action plans, as well as monitor the impact action plans are having on mission-critical measures.
How do we get the best value in clinical practice intervention?
Clinical Service Line analysis is critical, and so HMC links function information from your general ledger to clinical information from your DRG data. This in turn integrates with your quality outcome indicators, along with comparison group hospitals. Instantly, users can identify service line performers and non-performers, and drill down through DRGs, APRDRGS, and clinical components to physician-level performance data. This is supplemented with quality data from AHRQ and Core Measures.