The Data-Driven Guide to Performance Management in Healthcare

How can you tell how much your employees are contributing to your company’s growth or if there are potential risks within your company? Implementing performance management in healthcare based on data will significantly improve how your company runs as you will identify issues sooner and know which of your processes are working best.

Learn what healthcare performance management is and how to build a data-based performance management strategy in healthcare.

Key Takeaways:

• Performance management helps you keep track of your company’s health and identify potential issues
• Create goals, so you know what data you need to collect and analyze in your performance management processes.
• A healthcare data management tool is essential for removing data siloes and centralizing your information.

Why Is Performance Management in Healthcare Important?

Performance management is monitoring, analyzing, and optimizing your approaches to improve your healthcare systems. It can monitor the entire organization, a single department, or individual employees.

When you use data in your performance management, you gain a broader perspective of your organization and those that interact with your business for a better picture of each person’s role in how your company operates and contributes to your growth.

Some of the most common areas to manage your performance include:

• Leadership
• Financial
• Strategy
• Patients
• Operations
• Workforce
• Results
  

Performance Management Example

The following diagram shows the flow of performance management. In this example, the company is analyzing the effectiveness of its electronic health record security. It includes specific areas, goals, and how you measure the success of your processes.

Image Source: Excardo

7 Steps to Manage Your Company’s Performance through Data

Learn seven steps for creating your data-driven performance management process.

1. Create Specific Goals

Data-based performance management begins with a goal that aligns your teams and individuals. Your goal is a specific objective for tracking your performance and knowing when your employees are succeeding in their tasks. For example, your goal might be to improve your patient’s experience.

Your goals should go beyond a general mission statement and be a specific, measurable objective that includes a timeframe. For instance, instead of saying you want to improve the patient experience, you might say you would like to increase the number of patients that use your electronic health system by a specific number. You might also decide you want to increase the number of positive customer feedback you receive in the month.

Many businesses use the SMART goals model to build goals.

Image Source: Indeed

2. Establish Benchmarks for Measuring Your Success

Your metrics are key performance indicators that tell you how well your employees are performing to reach their goals. For instance, you might want to improve your security. However, that is a vague statement with no real clarity on what that looks like.

Instead, some cybersecurity metrics you can track to assess the security of your electronic healthcare system include:

• The time hackers have undetected access to healthcare data before security removes them
• The number of known vulnerabilities
• How many employees completed security training
• Who has access to healthcare records

3. Collect the Right Data

There were 44 zettabytes of data in 2020. Being data-centered doesn’t mean you have to collect all the available data possible. If you were, you would drown in overwhelming information about your employees, their touchpoints with patients, and patient interactions outside your company.

Each piece of data has a purpose, but not all data is relevant for performance management.

To understand what data is relevant, start with your goal and benchmarks. Then, focus on the data that relates to your objective. For example, your aim might be to improve patient care. Then, you should collect and analyze data relating to the patient’s care in your organization and other healthcare facilities to see how each employee contributes to a patient’s outcome.

4. Remove Data Siloes

Data siloes easily occur when dealing with multiple departments within your company and interactions with other facilities in the patient’s journey. For example, you have data from the patient’s home care routine, doctor appointments, and your company.

Data often remains trapped within the organization or department where it began, and this can prevent you from accurately monitoring your company’s performance and impact on patients because you don’t have a complete picture.

Roughly 95% of businesses say that data management is an issue. This often occurs because you don’t have the right tools.

Working with electronic health records and provider data management systems eliminates siloes by connecting all your data in one place where you and other relevant entities can access the data.

5. Centralize Your Information

A single source of truth ensures each department and team member is working with the same data when you’re managing your performance. Then, as the departments pass information back and forth, they all work with the same information.

A centralized platform makes this step easier as every facility or department records each interaction or healthcare result in real-time, where all relevant parties can access the information. Therefore, you’re always working with the most accurate information and can eliminate errors when information goes through several stops as it moves between parties.

When you receive information in real-time, you can also respond faster. As problems occur in your systems or with specific employees, you can identify them quicker and more accurately.

6. Create Data Reports

You probably hear “data” thrown around quite a bit, especially since it plays a significant role in modern businesses. However, do you know what it is and how to use it?

Data is information. It can be any information you gather and store, from employee projects to patient results. However, in its raw format, it isn’t always beneficial. For data to become valuable, you need to turn it into insights.

Healthcare master data management systems collect the data, then find patterns from that information which you can easily read through analytic reports. For instance, you can see where your organization is competent and running smoothly, where there are issues, and where there are serious risks that you need to address.

Your reports also summarize each employee’s performance in the past to help you make better decisions for the future based on reoccurring trends.

7. Optimize Your Strategy

The last part of performance management is adjusting your current processes and strategies according to what you learned from your data reports. As you see what’s working well and areas you need to improve, create action plans to optimize your structure to ensure continual growth while minimizing risks.

Unify Your Data for Improved Performance Management

The key to any successful performance management strategy is having a system that collects, stores, and analyzes data across your entire company. Gaine offers a solution designed for the needs of life science and biotech industries that removes data siloes and unites your information in one secure location.

Contact us to learn more about our data management system for healthcare.