Healthcare Performance Management

Healthcare Performance Management (PM)

As same as other organisation, Strategy at a healthcare organisation is initiated at top level but the implementation feeding is started at the bottom level. Performance management (PM) is a management tool that has been recently, applied at various organisations including healthcare sector. Fundamentally, its focus is to ensure effective strategy execution by looking at strategy as the object of value conception and therefore, coordinating all efforts, processes, resources, reports, along with staff commitment towards achieving the strategy.

The first stage of developing PM system in healthcare organisation is selecting and developing the conceptual framework. One of the well-known performance management frameworks is the Balanced Scorecard (BSC). it uses financial indicators, tracking the past performance, along with non-financial indicators, driving the future financial performance such as indicators for customer, internal business processes, learning and growth, are required for reporting long-term organisation performance (Kaplan and Norton, 1992).

the framework should contain distinct and multi-dimensional perspectives that are used for tracking organisation performance at all areas and perspective selection and design should be in accordance with the organisation strategy (DeBusk et al., 2003). At each perspective, a number of strategic direction or goals are demonstrated in a suitable format. Goals should be brief, directly express the strategy, and cover long period such as 3 years. Building strategy network or map suggested by (Kaplan and Norton, 2001), is used by many organisations for illustrating, communicating, and mapping the cause and effect of organisation goals (Ahn, 2001...

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...mainly, with actions planed for achieving strategy.

Furthermore, PM supports continual improvements as it doesn’t only illuminate achievement and practice impact but it also identifies and studies deviation from performance target and any faced problems and then relevant corrective actions are proposed. Rather than producing too many reports, PM help producing efficient reporting system designed to bring a meaningful image for tracking the performance and accordingly, decision-making and what are needed to enhance performance are better guided and are an evidence-base. Therefore, PM approach has been valued as an important framework to communicate, to implement strategy, and to point out improvement actions in different organizations including healthcare. Therefore Performance management is indispensable to effectively steer reforms in healthcare organisations.