Striving to improve is always a worthwhile pursuit, but measuring your own improvement is only one piece of the healthcare quality puzzle. To see the full picture of the effectiveness of your efforts, you need to understand how you compare.
That’s where healthcare benchmarking comes in.
Benchmarking allows you to compare yourself or your organization to others and it is a critical component of successful quality and performance improvement. This is especially true in clinical registries where benchmarks aren’t about rankings, but rather, achieving real-world results.
Let’s dive into the basics of healthcare benchmarking in registries.
In this post we will cover:
- What Is Healthcare Benchmarking and Why Does It Matter?
- How Do You Benchmark Healthcare Performance?
- What Are Examples of Healthcare Benchmarking?
What Is Healthcare Benchmarking and Why Does It Matter?
Put simply, benchmarking in healthcare means comparing the performance of an organization or clinician to others.
The goal of benchmarking in registries is to improve quality, efficiency, and patient experience. Accurate comparisons and fair benchmarking are critical components of successful quality improvement initiatives.
When it comes to registries, benchmarks are highly valuable for individual sites or clinicians.
Your registry participants can use benchmarks to understand how they compare to others and why. Benchmarks can help orient their organization in the broader healthcare landscape. They’ll not only understand where they rank — at the bottom, middle, or top of the pack — but also understand why.
Benchmarking allows hospitals and practices, individual clinicians, and other healthcare organizations to monitor their own performance, compared to their de-identified peers, as applicable. Benchmarks can be applied to metrics about patient characteristics, volume, processes, outcomes or other meaningful categories.
How Do You Benchmark Healthcare Performance?
One way we approach benchmarking is through our reporting framework.
We look at:
- Descriptive Statistics: Who makes up my population?
- Process and Adherence: What am I doing?
- Outcomes: What are my outcomes?
- Comparison: How do I compare?
After understanding the basics of your data, what initiatives you’re undertaking regarding process and adherence, and what your outcomes look like, benchmarking your metrics against your peers is the next crucial step.
Comparison has always been a key component of our analytics and reporting framework because it uncovers opportunities to improve.
We provide reporting and peer benchmarking capabilities at the clinician, practice, multi-practice, multi-facility, and organization levels. This enables organizations to compare individual clinicians or practices/sites to the appropriate benchmark.
To accurately analyze benchmarks, you need to clearly articulate both what metrics you are comparing and what organizations you are using as comparisons.
Metrics of interest for healthcare benchmarking include:
- Mortality rates
- Length of stay
- Readmissions
- Postoperative complications
- Patient wait times
- Adherence to established protocols, such as hand washing
- Patient satisfaction
- Pharmaceutical side effects and outcomes
- Outcomes following the use of medical devices
Comparison metrics are most accurate with a proper comparison group, also called a peer group. A peer group is a group of individuals or entities that share similar characteristics and interests among one another. Importantly, peer groups allow organizations to compare themselves to other, similar organizations.
To accurately identify your peer group, consider the following characteristics of healthcare organizations and practices:
- Bed size
- Procedure volume
- Provider volume
- Practice type (Private Practice, Academic/Research Hospital, Healthcare System, Outpatient Lab, Federal Government Facility)
- Private practices
- Geographic type (e.g. urban, rural suburban)
- Teaching hospital
- Department
- Single-specialty vs. multi-specialty
- Region
Benchmarking is a key competency of all reporting in our registries. We make the process simple by configuring specific groups for aggregation and benchmarking for you. The benchmark groups available to you can be managed through your administrative dashboard and you can modify them at any time. We include an organization-wide ‘All’ benchmark, as well as the ability to create peer groups of custom benchmarks. You can visually compare your organization’s performance to any benchmark, and benchmark values are color-coded on reports to allow for ease of use.
