Benchmarking Case

Benchmarking

Benchmarking is a method to evaluate the quality of outcomes by comparing an agency's performance against that of similar organizations. The objective of benchmarking is to meet "...customer requirements, developing accurate measures of productivity, and improving competitiveness" (Finkler, Kovner, & Jones, 2007, p. 341). Benchmarking is a productive and efficient strategy to investigate best practices and make improvements, with proven success rates.

The three benchmarking methods are: competitive benchmarking, cooperative benchmarking, and collaborative benchmarking. Competitive benchmarking is finding data on similar organizations that provide the same services. Cooperative benchmarking is searching for information from different organizations other than health care that the organization can integrate into health care to improve quality and cost. Collaborative benchmarking is the gathering of information "...within a particular industry but based on industry-wide statistics" (Finkler, Kovner, & Jones, 2007, p. 342). After analyzing these methods, the collaborative benchmarking technique was chosen to evaluate our proposed budget.

Evaluation of the Proposed Budget Against the Benchmark

Collaborative benchmarking will be incorporated into the capital project proposal for the implementation of electronic medical records (EMR). The organization can learn from other hospitals' experiences to ensure successful implementation. A budget for the EMR has been created, and the collaborative benchmarking will help evaluate its success. The hospital will look at their budget and compare this with other hospitals' budgets that already use an EMR system. Once the collaborative benchmarking analysis is complete, the hospital will understand how to adequately budget for the project.

Benchmarking has 10 steps: deciding what to benchmark; identification of organizations to use in the benchmarking; collecting the data for the benchmarking; determining the difference between the better organizations, and one's own; project improvement over the next few years; communicate the results of the benchmarking to the organization; creating goals; establishing specific plans on how to improve based on the benchmarking findings; incorporating the plans, and reevaluating benchmarks as they alter over time (Camp, 1989). An analysis of budget spreadsheets is required to determine the budget differences between the hospital wanting to implement the EMR and the hospitals already using this system. Collaborative benchmarking is usually anonymous; the hospital will receive budget data, regarding the EMR system, from other hospitals but they will not know which hospital has the best or worst budget. Once the collaborative benchmarking analysis of the budget is completed, the hospital will know where its weaknesses