Are we measuring enough?

Every industry measures its processes. In fact Automobile industry went to the extent of measuring and standardizing each step such that they almost removed the waste and called it 'Just in Time'.

Unfortunately healthcare hasn't developed the culture of metrics or KPI yet. But believe me its high time we started doing it, because the capex and opex is beginning to spiral out of control.

Biology is not 2+2=4. In Healthcare we cant standardize everything as the Automobile industry, because we deal with human body with so many variations. Worst of all god didnt give release notes and users mannual! However we can measure each standard step in the clinical process and consolidate it every week, month or quarter. We need to start measuring the key performance indicators [KPI] of our hospitals. This will help us find out if our resources are productive and utilized. It will tell us when we need to add more resources. It will also tell us if there is any spare capacity which we can use. We can also track errors in the process.

Operational KPI have direct bearing on Financials of a hospital. I recomend the following KPI at practice, department, hospital and population level:

• Productivity - Time taken per unit of work - measure for People, Equipment
• Utilization - Time effectively used vs. time available - measure for Beds, People, Equipment
• Defects - number of process errors reported
  

Time is a common dimension accross e.g. by week, by month, by quarter..

Ideally activity based costing should also be done in a hospital. However in absence of the granular data, at least department level operational data aggregation should be done. They say unless you measure you dont know how far you are in the path.