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Five key performance indicators for healthcare organisations: People, quality, time, growth & financial performance

Executive Summary

Performance indicators play a vital role in the management and transformation of a hospital or laboratory. It is essential to have the right key performance indicator (KPI) information at your fingertips, whether you are providing insights to managers for developing teams and assuring quality standards, or to executives to help plan their strategic investments. Working with Roche Healthcare Consulting to transform your clinical diagnostic infrastructure, organisation and processes, can ensure KPI reporting stays clear and simple, and that strategic decision-making is informed by the most accurate, up-to-date information.

Importance of KPIs in organisational excellence

KPIs are now well-accepted across healthcare as a toolkit for driving improvements and boosting performance.

A 2015 study into the use of KPIs across hospitals noted that “Healthcare managers are aware of the effect of using measures on monitoring and improving performance, yet they rarely use measurement as an essential part of their strategies and tactics. […] It is very essential to develop strategic key performance indicators that reflect the actual performance of healthcare organisations.”⁵

This uncertainty around the proper applications of KPIs and data analytics is also apparent in the findings from Managed Healthcare Executive’s 2018 ‘Data analytics challenges facing healthcare organisations’ survey, which found that:⁶

33% of respondents’ pressing IT problem is a difficulty in turning data into actionable information; and that
30% of respondents’ do not have enough members of staff with adequate expertise in data analytics.

Consultants can help hospitals and laboratories to implement and monitor KPIs as part of a wider, long-term improvement strategy. Importantly, rather than to try and impose an inflexible set of KPIs onto a customer, a good consultant will tailor KPIs to the individual needs of that laboratory and project. It also important to bear in mind that what might constitute a KPI to a laboratory manager may be very different to what might be a relevant KPI to a laboratory technician.

Consultants therefore must be adept at drilling into the granular detail of what matters most to different stakeholders within that organisation and how they define success. The KPIs that arise out of these analyses must then correspond to these definitions and drive forward this balance of stakeholder ambitions.

For example, Roche Healthcare Consulting does not only engage with senior management when defining which KPIs will be applied to measuring transformation in an organisation. Instead, consultants get the buy in from employees at every level, creating a project-specific KPI framework that ensures all members of an organisation are aligned and equally invested in driving transformation.

Roche’s research also identified which KPIs its clients consider to be most relevant to their organisations.

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Five key performance indicators for healthcare organisations

People, financial performance, quality, growth and time

Roche Healthcare Consulting takes a unique approach to KPIs, mapping them onto the client’s transformation strategy across five dimensions: people, financial performance, quality, growth and time. This method allows consultants to take into account market conditions and other outside determining factors when considering whether a particular organisation is looking to expand, defend their position or pursue other avenues of change. The bespoke KPIs that emerge can cover everything from turnaround time to levels of noise pollution, from customer satisfaction to staff retention rates.

By building KPIs around people, financial performance, quality, growth, and time into every project, we ensures a balance for clients between key business perspectives, how the organisation sees itself and how others see it, its business needs now and how these might change over time. In doing so, our consultants help to focus their client on what steps they need to take in partnership to deliver breakthroughs in performance. People, financial performance, quality, growth and time are uniting factors that can also help to integrate a variety of projects with disparate aims that may be running simultaneously. This holistic approach breaks down organisational silos, translating strategy into measurable targets and providing managers and employees alike with a clear understanding of how organisational transformation goals interface with their day-to-day working.

Our approach to measuring success and mapping the progress of transformation is scientific and works on the principle that managers need to be as forensic with KPI data as scientists are with clinical data. How can laboratory managers and consultants expect to diagnose organisational and strategic problems together and propose timely, appropriate solutions without a strong base of reliable evidence?

The value of accurate, global benchmarking

Another important element of the KPI process is benchmarking – comparing the laboratory’s performance with that of its competitors. A ‘benchmark’ is the best-in-class performance that can be achieved for a specific business process, and the analysis of benchmarks provides consultants with the answers to crucial questions, including which organisation performs better in their client’s field, what makes them better, and what actions need to be taken to match this performance? With the information generated through benchmarking, consultants are able to develop performance indices that enable the identification of internal targets and industry norms. From this, they can then set internal performance targets and measure progress towards strategic goals. As global providers of diagnostic consultancy services, Roche Healthcare Consulting possesses a unique overview of the worldwide performance of diagnostic laboratories.
This empowers consultants to reliably advise healthcare organisations on how their performance and progress in achieving their goals corresponds to the reality of peers facing comparable challenges. In APAC alone, we draw on data compiled from more than 1,000 individual laboratories as part of its annual KPI-related benchmarking process.

Conclusion

Roche Healthcare Consulting takes a slightly different approach from other consultants in applying KPIs to our clients’ improvement initiatives. Our consultants do not impose a rigid framework of KPIs on our clients, instead tailoring KPIs to the specific needs of each project and map them across the core functions of people, financial performance, quality, growth, and timeliness.

Roche also does not limit client engagement to C-suite. Our consultants work with employees at every level to define the KPIs that will help them to drive improvement across their organisation. This approach ensures that the organisations Roche works with are fully aligned on how they approach KPIs and that everyone working in that environment is fully aligned and equally invested in the transformation.

Across a spectrum of healthcare organisations, Roche Healthcare Consulting has experience in building KPI frameworks and translating their outputs into specific action points.

Authors

Patrice Doisne

Senior Project Manager
Roche Healthcare Consulting,
EMEA – LATAM Region

Mah Sam Yew

Consulting Team Manager,
Lab Workflow Solutions

References

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Azadmanjir Z, Torabi M, Safdari R, Bayat M, Golmahi F. 2015. A map for clinical laboratories management indicators in the intelligent dashboard. Available at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4584098. Date accessed: July 2018.
Roche Diagnostics International. 2017. Voice of Customer: Customer KPIs matching Roche’s differentiated solutions.
Khalifa M, Khalid P. 2015. The 5th International Conference on Current and Future Trends of Information and Communication Technologies in Healthcare (ICTH 2015). Available at https://ac.els-cdn.com/S187705091502503X/1-s2.0-S187705091502503X-main.pdf. Date accessed: July 2018.
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