Benchmarking In Health Care

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A well-structured strategic business plan can help a health care organizations improve efficiency of service delivery, profitability, patient satisfaction and cost reduction not only in the short term but also in the long term. A good business plan is the formal process that can be used by health care to identify areas that can be improved. Some of the strategies that can be used in planning are benchmarking, Health Information Technology (HIT), risk management plan and disaster preparedness strategies.
Benchmarking
Benchmarking can be used to compare financial performance of an organization using internal or external benchmarks to identify opportunities for performance improvement. Benchmarking is a management approach to planning used to …show more content…

In involves comparing the results of individual, team or department to that of another within the same organization. From the comparison, the procedure or practice with the best results is established and can thus be applied to other people, teams or departments of the organization with an aim of improvement. The main advantage of internal type of benchmarking is that it is fast and cheap. In addition, it is easy to do inter-service visits without major confidentiality issues. More importantly, internal benchmarking is a useful for learning the benchmarking method.
External Benchmarking
External benchmarking on the other hand is the commonly understood form of benchmarking. This strategy involves comparing the statistical data of one organization with that of another but within the same industry. An analysis of the data is made and a report is generated which is reviewed by the organization seeking to improve. The finest aspects of practice and performance are then chosen to be adopted. In principle, external benchmarking enables the management of an organization to compare their performance with that of its key competitors.
Health Information Technology (HIT) …show more content…

In developing a business plan for health care, the administrator should protect patient information from unwarranted access and cyber attack (Perakslis, 2014). A good Health Information Technology (HIT) System should be able to facilitate ease of access, updating and management of all records in the organization. This can be achieved by implementing health care information technology that can support management of health records. A good software that can be considered is the cloud based EPIC EHRs program. Implementing a cloud based EHR program is important for any practice. For instance, it enhances the security of medical records. Unlike server-based and client based EHRs, cloud based EHRs are not susceptible to hectic downtime that are caused by software glitches and human error (Pennic, 2013). The data is also encrypted to protect it from unwarranted access and cyber attacks. Secondly, cloud-based EHR systems are cost effective because their initial cost is low while the return on investment is high (Wang and Biedermann, 2010). Hardware installation costs and licensing fees are not needed while the implementation cost is just a small fraction of the cost of implementing server-based EHRS. Moreover, redundant costs are significantly reduced. Third, cloud based EHRs improve accessibility of