Get to the root of a performance problem with scorecards

Computerworld - At the 600-bed Maine Medical Center, information comes pouring in faster than ambulances rushing in with the wounded -- or at least it can seem that way. Hospital officials felt they needed a more efficient way to gauge their performance in areas including clinical outcome, patient satisfaction, doctor performance and safety, and then coordinate all of the data and make it available 24/7.

"We had PowerPoints, paper, Excel worksheets, and nothing was standardized," explains Peter Chingos, data analysis manager at the medical center, in Portland, Maine. Executives wanted to centralize that information and get data to senior-level administrators in a standardized way so it had the same look and feel, he says. The idea of creating balanced scorecards was tossed around, and, after observing an implementation at Boston's Brigham & Women's Hospital, Maine Medical Center also decided to deploy Strategic Performance Management software from SAS.

The hospital has created dozens of scorecards. Among the metrics: how often staffers wash their hands and whether a patient with both congestive heart failure and pneumonia is offered a flu vaccination. The scorecards allow hospital staffers to see how these changes -- compliance with best practices, process redesign and team building -- affect patient care and the hospital's finances. By checking progress on the intranet, staff members can see how their groups are doing on a monthly basis.

Using scorecards has driven demand beyond my expectations, and the demand for data in health care right now is huge.

Peter Chingos, Maine Medical Center

Today there are between 50 and 60 scorecards in use, each with some 25 metrics that give the ability to do subsequent drilldown to get charts, graphs and tables that provide more granular information, says Chingos. The hospital selects measures where improvement is needed, which makes the scorecards a tool for focusing employees on top priorities.

Maine Medical's leadership identifies these measures each year to reflect the hospital's quality- and safety-related strategic priorities. The current batch shows a focus on internal policies as well as regulatory issues, Chingos says.

It's an up-and-coming area. Business intelligence is scorecards' "parent on the software evolutionary tree," notes Ezra Gottheil, an analyst at Technology Business Research in Hampton, N.H. Performance management software is a refinement and a refocusing of business intelligence data so it is now matched up with goals and budgets, he adds.

Companies are using this approach to refine or outright change their current methods for measuring performance. Another way to use the technique is if the competition is gaining market share and they want to figure out what to do about it, Gottheil says.