Health Care Benchmarking, Research Paper Example

What is the impact of benchmarking on quality of care? What is the value?

A company’s approach to management for implementing best practices at reduced costs is the basic concept of benchmarking in health care. The concept of benchmarking focuses on continuous quality improvement (CQI) initiatives. The impact of benchmarking on quality of care in the health care setting by “identifying a point of comparison, called the benchmark, against which everything else can be compared” (Ettorchi-Tardy, Levif, & Michel, 2012, p. e103). Additionally, benchmarking impacts patient satisfaction, as improving best practices facilitates organizational and cultural changes within companies. The value of benchmarking comes from improved outcomes on performance to help identify disparities in care, and also to analyze operational processes and factors of success to achieve high performance levels (Ettorchi-Tardy, Levif, & Michel, 2012).

Another definition of benchmarking is “a process of comparison between the performance characteristics of separate, often competing organisations intended to enable each participant to improve its own performance in the marketplace” (Kay, 2007, p. 22). It is proposed that benchmarking focuses on competitor and customer requirements, which impacts how health care organizations innovate their processes and products to share throughout the health care industry, which contributes to overall quality of care. The value in this is that health care organizations can better identify their strengths on which to capitalize or their weaknesses of which to improve on. This also allows health care organizations to establish new standards and develop goals based on the quality and cost of their products and services (Kay, 2007).

References

Ettorchi-Tardy, A., Levif, M., & Michel, P. (2012, May). Benchmarking: A Method for Continuous Quality Improvement in Health. Health Policy, 7(4), e101-e119.

Kay, J. F. (2007, February). Health Care Benchmarking. The Hong Kong Medical Diary, 12(2), 22-27.