Measuring performance in hospitals: The development of an operational dashboard to coordinate and optimize patient, material and information flows

Abstract

Currently, many Western countries are seeking ways to increase the efficiency and quality of health care. These efforts reflect stakeholders’ expectations of improving performance in response to two important challenges. First, health care expenditures rise continuously and question the financial sustainability of current delivery systems. Secondly, health care systems suffer from unexplained variability and gaps in the quality of the patient-centered care. To make hospitals more patient-centered it is necessary to intervene on patient flow logistics. This assumes an integrated view on patient, material and information flows to align the different steps in the care process with the supporting processes and the required resources. Consequently, the development of process-oriented performance measurement systems is crucial. Most performance measures in hospitals are not process-oriented at the moment and cannot help a health care system to better synchronize the patient, material and information flows. This research describes a method to develop a reliable and valid set of both quality-focused and process-oriented key performance indicators and applies the findings to a case study on the process of hip replacement patients taking the opinion of internal stakeholders into account.