What is benchmarking in healthcare

In specifying the numerator, the practice will need to define what constitutes the desired performance. Will monofilament testing alone be adequate, or will it need to be combined with visual inspection, testing for sensation, or palpation of pulses?

Or will any one of these approaches be deemed adequate? How accurately these events are documented will be important in determining the usefulness of the available data. In specifying the denominator, the practice will need to establish what constitutes an opportunity to deliver the desired action. For this example, you might define the denominator as the number of diabetic patients who have had a health care encounter in the past 12 months.

Denominators in particular are important in understanding and interpreting data so it is very important that you are careful to use the appropriate denominator.

For example, if you are working with a practice to determine what percentage of its patients with diabetes have hemoglobin A1c HbA1c values of 8 or higher, you would want to use for the denominator only those patients with diabetes who have HbA1c values available in their record. If you use any diabetic patients regardless of whether they have an HbA1c value available, the percentage of patients who have elevated HbA1cs will be artificially depressed.

As you and the practice monitor progress in improving performance on this metric over time, you will need to consider how the denominator may change. For example, a monthly audit of performance on this metric might use diabetic patients receiving care in the previous month as the denominator and the number of these patients who had received a foot exam within the past 12 months as the numerator.

It can be tricky defining an appropriate denominator. If you do not select the correct denominator, you may under- or overstate performance. For example, when calculating the percentage of diabetic patients with low-density lipoprotein LDL below , you would specify the denominator as the number of diabetic patients with an LDL test, not just the number of diabetic patients.

Similarly, if you were tabulating the percentage of patients who gave the most positive response to a question on a survey, you would specify the denominator as the number of patients who answered that question, not the number who were surveyed. You will also need to help the practice decide which, if any, subgroups they want to evaluate. For example, you may want to measure performance for patients who have had a visit in the past quarter or who have been in treatment for at least 6 months.

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. Benchmarking can help clinicians understand their individual performance compared to their peers and assess how a change in protocol or a quality improvement initiative is working.

Benchmarks can also help clinicians assess their efficiency, case mix, and quality in comparison to others. For example, a clinician may notice that a particular peer has exceptional medication adherence among his patients. This may encourage conversations about communication techniques and other patient engagement strategies to improve performance.

Armed with useful and engaging benchmarking insights, clinicians are empowered to course-correct in real-time to elevate their performance and improve patient outcomes overall. To both deliver high-value healthcare and succeed with value-based reimbursement , insights gleaned from hospital benchmarking are critical. By seeing how they compare to their peers, hospitals can better understand the results of organization-wide quality improvement initiatives, manage resources, reduce costs, improve outcomes across episodes of care, drive real-time interventions, and optimize participation and results in value-based reimbursement programs.

The Hospital Quality Institute HQI is a state-level registry dedicated to the study and coordination of patient safety and quality improvement initiatives throughout California. It is a central source for all California hospitals to obtain timely, actionable intelligence to drive their quality improvement efforts.

The Hospital Quality Improvement Platform shows hospitals how they measure up to other hospitals in their region and to statewide quality standards. Hospitals who use the platform understand their performance and where they need to improve.

The cloud-based platform provides access to risk-adjusted episode quality measures for common acute conditions most affected by hospital quality initiatives. It delivers insights into hospital-acquired conditions, patient safety indicators, and inpatient quality indicators.

Hospitals can also drill into benchmarks and reports to determine the underlying drivers of variation. Specifically, reports within the HQI platform show hospital performance over time and provide hospitals with meaningful peer comparisons across the state, by region, and by hospital size, for standardized measures that matter for improving care delivery.

By participating, hospitals can dig into their opportunities for improvement and identify valuable actions they can take to make progress. Once device manufacturers have a product on the market, they need to understand how that device performs in the real world.

Registries are the perfect tool for this. This will only take a minute. What is your current role in health care? Hospital Administrator. Health Care Professional.

Next Step We value your privacy. Who is this brochure for? We value your privacy.