Background:
Hospitalist groups face increasing pressure to substantiate quality and efficiency of care through performance data. Academic groups are expected to advance the field through scholarly work and provide quality education to students and house staff. A common challenge is balancing performance in each of these key areas. The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) was introduced in 1992 as a way for corporations to take a holistic view of themselves by balancing performance in 4 areas: financial, customers, internal processes, and learning and growth. Since then, it has been used successfully by many organizations as a strategic management tool: ensuring that groups make strategic decisions using data by forcing them to translate their vision into specific and measurable goals, as well as providing a broad snapshot of performance in a single place. As part of a strategic planning initiative, we developed a division of hospital medicine BSC.
Purpose:
To develop a BSC for an academic division of hospital medicine.
Description:
Our goals for this project were to (1) develop benchmarks that were internally driven, rather than simply dictated by external agencies; (2) harness the data to guide strategic decisions; (3) identify areas where performance could be improved; and (4) demonstrate areas of exceptional performance. We began by translating the 4 commonly used BSC areas into domains more applicable to academic medicine. These are: clinical, education, academics/dissemination, and community/partnerships. We convened our group's leaders and key stakeholders to brainstorm a group of metrics using our vision statement as a foundation. Our criteria were that these metrics be important to our group, easily and reliably measurable, and our group could directly affect and improve performance. Using a modified Delphi method, we prioritized and identified 14 metrics (see Table 1). We then identified data sources and whether internal or external benchmarks existed. The BSC will be presented quarterly, and we will be using this performance data to continually inform and modify quality initiatives and strategic decisions and priorities. As the group becomes more familiar with these performance metrics, we plan to develop individual balanced scorecards as a way for individuals to understand and improve their own performance.
TABLE 1
Conclusions:
We developed a BSC of internally driven metrics that has helped us to identify our strategic priorities and to inform our strategic decisions with objective data while ensuring that these indicators provide a holistic view of our organization's performance.
Disclosures:
M. Hwa ‐ none; B. Sharpe ‐ none