¶ … high-quality healthcare services to families with children suffering from a broad range of developmental disabilities is a challenging enterprise in any setting, but the constraints to productivity faced by Cattaraugus County ReHabilitation Center were daunting indeed. The Center had grown to include a number of organizations that provide specialized care to disabled children, but it had outgrown its old business model when a Balanced Scorecard initiative was implemented. This paper examines the Center's efforts to determine if the job they did in implementing a balanced scorecard approach was effective in reflecting its organizational mission and vision. A summary of the research and an overall evaluation of the Center's efforts are provided in the conclusion. Review and Analysis

The balanced scorecard approach developed by Kaplan and Norton (1992) is intended to provide managers with quantifiable performance metrics that link outcome measures with measures reflecting future outcome drivers (Martello, Watson & Fischer, 2008). According to Martello et al., the balanced scorecard approach provides a framework for organizing strategic objectives into four perspectives: (a) financial (the strategy for growth, comparability, and risk viewed from the perspective of the shareholder); (b) customer (the strategy for creating value and differentiation from the perspective of the customer); (c) internal business processes...

75).
There are some special considerations involved in applying the balanced scorecard approach to non-profit organizations such as Cattaraugus County ReHabilitation Center. For instance, Martello et al. suggest that, "In the not-for-profit sector, the financial perspective provides a constraint rather than an objective. Not-for-profits [should] consider placing a mission objective at the top of their scorecard as the mission represents the accountability between the not-for-profit and society" (p. 70). In addition, Kaplan and Norton (1992) recommend not-for-profit organizations should "expand the definition of who their customer is" (cited in Martello et al., p. 70). An application of the four Balanced Scorecard perspectives to Cattaraugus County ReHabilitation Center efforts to evaluate their effectiveness is provided in Table 2 below.

Table 2

Application of the four Balanced Scorecard perspectives to Cattaraugus County ReHabilitation Center

Perspective

Summary

Application to Cattaraugus County ReHabilitation Center (CCRC)

Financial

This is the strategy for growth, comparability, and risk viewed from the…