Understanding benchmarking

In order to meet the challenges facing health care today, organizations are turning to new approaches. Benchmarking is one such approach. Benchmarking is externally driven, encouraging organizations to look outside their own walls to learn from others and achieve exemplar performance. Organizations can benchmark within their own systems, against competitors, against "best-in-class" companies in the same general industry and against "best-in-class" companies in different industries. A four-step approach to benchmarking includes planning, collecting information, analyzing results and adapting and improving. A benchmarking study team composed of the process owner and other users of the process conducts the study. Application of benchmarking to healthcare materiel management is particularly appropriate, since many materiel management processes occur in other industries and, therefore, best practices outside the healthcare industry may be adapted. The practice, through growing in other industries, is still very new in health care.     

Health care benchmarking 2003

The latest benchmarking data reveal both old trends and some surprises. Once again, hospitals in high managed care markets outperformed those in low managed care markets in profitability measures, such as total margin and return on equity. However, hospitals in areas with low managed care penetration had a lower percentage of bad-debt expense and significantly fewer days in accounts receivable and more days cash on hand.     

Internet-based program cuts benchmarking tasks

Practicing by the numbers: The Medical Group Management Association has taken on the task of profiling U.S. physicians, and it's thinking big. The strategy is to entice physician participation with cheap enrollment fees and the promise of aggregated data fast.     

Coding changes could affect benchmarking

CMS intends to move to a severity-adjusted system for DRGs; number of codes may double. ICD-10 will allow for more specific codes, which could affect benchmark data. Understanding the new codes and data will be critical to uncovering opportunities for improvement.     

Peds benchmarking group gathers outcomes data

Company literature refers to it as a national child health outcomes conference, but staff refer to it as the Halloween Meeting. A group of physicians, pediatric hospital chief executives, and representatives from payers and national quality organizations came together on Oct. 31, 1997, to ask questions and brainstorm about how to develop a mechanism for measuring pediatric outcomes.