Describe the types of benchmarks that are appropriate for healthcare organizations.

 

Explanation

Internal benchmarking

Internal benchmarking is a benchmarking between departments, divisions, and offices within the same hospital. This benchmarking is essential because many healthcare organizations have many locations and want to examine a particular set of measures across those locations. For instance, as a hospital administrator, you may want to know whether your southeast clinic or your northeast clinic scores are higher for overall patient satisfaction. Monitoring this measure across all organization branches may shed light on issues that need to be addressed and help specific branches improve their processes or practices.

Functional benchmarking

Functional benchmarking is appropriate to a health care organization because it is used to compare your organization to those in a different industry that may have the same process your organization could learn from. Functional benchmarking is excellent for looking at the operational data of a healthcare organization.

Competitive benchmarking

Competitive benchmarking is appropriate to a healthcare organization because it compares its metrics directly with that of your competitors. Also, competitive benchmarking examines your healthcare metrics against clinics and hospitals serving in the same geographical area to ensure that your health care organization is competitive against those in the market. It also looks at hospitals that serve different markets or are in a separate geographical area. Because you aren't competing against these entities, you can use the data to learn from one another and further improve your processes.