Make the benchmarking data work for you
Make the benchmarking data work for you
Make changes, track them over time
If you don’t like the data you get from your benchmarking efforts, take a tip from Cardio-vascular Associates, PC: Come up with a plan to make them better.
When the Birmingham, AL, practice identifies an area in which the practice as a whole or individual physicians score below the norm, they come up with a plan to improve it, says William Cockrell, FACMPE, administrator of the 38-physician practice.
For example, one physician who scored lower than he liked on patient satisfaction spent several days shadowing a physician who had a high score, trying to learn what the high-scoring physician was doing.
After a quality improvement benchmarking study, the practice was able to reduce its false-positive rates on nuclear studies to less than 15%. For that study, the practice took the results from its own in-house nuclear department and the catheterization results from its outpatient laboratory and compared them to nuclear studies done in the hospital and read by the CVA staff, and nuclear studies done elsewhere on patients referred to the catheterization lab.
The study showed that the group’s practice rate was good, compared to those of other nuclear studies. However, the physicians wanted to improve even more. They decided to add another step to the nuclear protocol, which involves doing another image. As a result, the false-positive rate dropped and now is below 15% compared to 35% in tests done elsewhere.
"By reducing the number of false positives, we reduced the number of catheterization we do. It doesn’t help the bottom line, but it is the right way to be doing things," he says.
"The most important thing in a benchmarking project is just looking at the data and asking why they’re the way they are," says Sandra McGraw, MBA, chief executive officer of The Health Care Group, a Plymouth Meeting, PA, consulting firm.
After you examine your data, come up with a plan for improving your performance, then benchmark against yourself to see if the changes you are making are working.
For instance, if you have a 10% no-show rate, you might want to consider reminder calls or post cards. In a year, look at the data again and see if the rate has dropped.
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