Five tips for a successful benchmarking project
Five tips for a successful benchmarking project
1. Research the data you’re comparing yourself against.
If you are using benchmarks you bought, the most important thing you can do is to read the sourcebook and find out where the organization got its data, says Sandra McGraw, MBA, chief executive officer of The Health Care Group, a Plymouth Meeting, PA, consulting firm. "If you don’t know where the data are coming from, you don’t know whether they will be helpful to you," she points out.
If you are a small practice in inner-city Philadel-phia, it won’t help to compare yourself to a large suburban practiced in the Midwest.
2. Look for comparable groups to make sure you’re comparing apples to apples.
"One medical group is not the same as another. In our case, we’re a very comprehensive cardiology practice that has two physicians who specialize in nuclear medicine. Another group may not have any subspecialties," says William Cockrell, FACMPE, administrator of Cardiovascular Associates, PC, a Birmingham, AL, cardiology practice.
3. Appoint a physician advocate to support the project.
Your practice needs a physician advocate for the benchmarking project to avoid the "shoot the messenger" syndrome, McGraw says. Often people who vary from the norm insist that the data are wrong and take it out on the person who is presenting the data. "Be extremely careful in the way your present the information. It’s not always received in the way it’s delivered," she says.
4. Understand the measurements the survey is making.
Don’t just look at the data. Look at the questions to make sure the comparison is as close as possible to your group. If you have a lot of midlevel providers, the support staff ratios may not be a good thing to measure.
5. When you compare yourself to other practices, decide if your statistics are a cause for concern.
If your overhead rate is 37% and the benchmark says it should be 36%, you probably wouldn’t be concerned. But if yours is 45%, you want to examine the reason.
You need a good manager to decipher what the difference is. The benchmark gives you an idea of where you need to look further," says Elizabeth Woodcock, MBA, FACMPE, an Atlanta-based independent consultant with the Medical Group Management Association in Englewood, CO.
Subscribe Now for Access
You have reached your article limit for the month. We hope you found our articles both enjoyable and insightful. For information on new subscriptions, product trials, alternative billing arrangements or group and site discounts please call 800-688-2421. We look forward to having you as a long-term member of the Relias Media community.