Question

Benchmarking is gaining a lot of attention in healthcare industry these days. Benchmarking allows healthcare managers to assess and measure the quality of an organization's policies, products, programs, strategies, etc., and their comparison with standard measurements, or similar measurements of its peers. The objectives of benchmarking are (1) to determine what and where improvements are called for, (2) to analyze how other organizations achieve their high performance levels, and (3) to use this information to improve performance.

Discuss three departments in a healthcare organization which you as a healthcare manager would benefit by utilize Benchmarking as a measurement tool?

Answer 1

Benchmarking is a tool which helps in comparing and analysing the actual performance of the department of an organization. Benchmarking is the process of setting standards for the department and also includes process of comparing and analysing the real performance of the departments of an organization.

Now as per requirement of the question let’s discuss three department in a healthcare organization. Following may be three departments;

·        Patient care department

·        Finance department

·        Administrative depatment

These above mentioned departments are very common in all healthcare organizations, although there may be some other departments also but here I am including three departments.

Patient care department;

With the help of benchmarking, a healthcare organization can fix standards for the actual performance and on the basis on these standards that organization will compare actual performance of patient care department to know the possible deviations. So after finding out deviations we can take corrective actions for improving performance of the patient care department. Thus it is true that benchmarking is very useful tool for comparing & analysing the performance of this department.

Finance department;

Finance is the backbone of any organization and proper management of the finance is required in every type of healthcare organization. So with the help of benchmarking we can manage performance of finance department and for finding out the deviations so that corrective actions can be taken within due time period.

Administrative depatment;

Administration is required in every type of organization. So proper management of administartive department is necessary to get desired results otherwise all department will suffer.

In other words we can say that with the help of benchmarking, we can continously measure the actual performance of the administrative department so that a proper level of efficiency can be maintained to perform all functions of administrative department. Overall we can say that benchmarking will help in proper monitoring & controlling of the performance of this department.