Performance benchmarking. Part 2: Trends in home health care & what's in store for the future.

The need to change will catch up with an organization whether it overtly incorporates a change and evolution program or, less desirably, has to inefficiently react to and recover from change forced from the outside. The latter approach can be devastating in terms of staff morale, patient well-being, cost and revenues, staff retention, and organizational pride. It is far wiser to embrace, learn about, and efficiently incorporate the new practices and approaches in home health care that will result from progressively more emphasis on benchmarking, understanding and using the valuable benchmark information internally, and by virtue of understanding and using such information, contribute constructively to the evolution of home health care both externally and internally.

Performance benchmarking. Part 1: What it is & how to use it.

Benchmarking provides data necessary to evaluate an organization against norms for various administrative and clinical purposes. There are many different types of statistical comparisons used to benchmark one organization against others, or against itself over time. Careful selection of benchmarking strategies can give an organization confidence in the results, thereby maximizing the usefulness of the data for decision making and performance improvement.