Setting Targets Benchmarks and Standards

¶ … Balanced Scorecard for a Hospital System by Pink, G. H, McKillip, E.G., Preyra, C., Montgomery, C., and Baker, G.R. This article shows setting targets, benchmarks, and standards is not limited to educational settings, and workers and service providers in all other sectors are subject to their own accountability mechanisms.

Reflective Review Business and industry first introduced the idea of setting targets for accountability purposes in the Total Quality Management (TQM) era twenty-five years ago, and with the rising cost of health care today, they become even more important to viable health care providers and the general public. This article illustrates how to create a balanced scorecard for hospital systems, and discusses why these scorecards are so important to modern health care organizations.

One of the most important things to take into account when creating a scorecard for hospitals is to note they are extremely intricate organizations, and so, performance cannot be measured by one simple formula or "dimension" (Pink, et. al. 4). Clearly, hospitals need to know their effectiveness just as much as any other organization, and these scorecards not only help the public become more aware of the quality of service provided, they help the health care professionals analyze their own strengths and weaknesses, to create a more viable and cost-effective facility.

The authors' give comprehensive data on what kind of information hospitals need to analyze to determine their performance, and how to modify the data for different types of hospitals, such as community hospitals vs. teaching hospitals, which may have very different indications as well as desired outcomes. The article is not only quite informative and useful for anyone in the health care profession who desires more information on.