Healthcare KPI or metric is a clearly defined performance indicator utilized to monitor, analyse, and enhance all relevant healthcare processes with the goal of enhancing patient satisfaction. Many of these metrics serve as specific key performance indicators for hospitals. In the present day, healthcare professionals are not only guided by science and patient care but must also manage a wide range of data to ensure optimal care, sustainable hospital performance, and cost efficiency. Developing a professional healthcare dashboard can aid managers in optimizing these processes and delivering significant value for both hospitals and patients. Success in this endeavour requires the use of appropriate tools, particularly healthcare analytics tools, and the selection of relevant metrics for monitoring. By consolidating and organizing these elements, the production of comprehensive healthcare reports represents the final step towards maximizing efficiency.
Healthcare Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are essential metrics used to evaluate the performance of healthcare organizations, departments, or individuals in achieving their goals and objectives. These KPIs help measure the effectiveness, efficiency, and quality of healthcare services provided, ultimately leading to improved patient outcomes and satisfaction. In this article, we will delve into the importance and significance of healthcare KPIs in the ever-evolving healthcare industry.
Healthcare organizations face numerous challenges in delivering quality care while managing costs and increasing patient satisfaction. Healthcare KPIs provide valuable insights into key areas of performance, such as patient wait times, staff productivity, financial sustainability, and clinical outcomes. By monitoring and analysing these metrics, healthcare leaders can make informed decisions to drive operational efficiency, enhance patient care, and improve overall performance.
When choosing healthcare KPIs, it is crucial to align them with the organization's strategic goals and objectives. KPIs should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). For example, common healthcare KPIs include:
By selecting the right healthcare KPIs, organizations can focus on areas that require improvement, leading to better outcomes for patients and stakeholders.
Nirmalya Business Intelligence Platform is a comprehensive suite of analytics solutions designed for the modern enterprise. By leveraging AI-powered predictive and prescriptive analytics along with role-specific insights, this platform allows organizations to move beyond basic data analysis and fully embrace an analytics-driven approach to decision-making. Benefit from unified analytics and a holistic view of performance, utilizing prebuilt ML models to gain a deeper understanding of your business, receive informed recommendations, and achieve positive outcomes. With its robust features and seamless integration capabilities, this platform empowers organizations to make well-informed decisions and enhance efficiency across their operations. Below, you will find key KPIs and Metrics for the Nirmalya BI platform:
Average Hospital Stay
The average length of stay in hospital is a pretty straight-forward KPI, as it measures the time spent, on average, by a patient accepted in the facility. This healthcare metric is a very general one and can vary according to the type of stay it measures: a heart transplant surgery will increase the figure while a wisdom teeth removal will do the opposite. This is why it is interesting to breakdown this KPI in different categories of stay, procedures, and operations, so as to have a more accurate result. After different evaluations over this KPI, you may set a target length of stay (accordingly to the type of stay and procedure) that you would like to achieve.
Bed Occupancy Rate
It’s an important element of analytics, and it quickly shows how many beds were occupied during a specific period, expressed in percentage. Higher occupancies could mean a number of things such as a pandemic but the goal is to keep the occupancy under control, otherwise, there are risks of extreme facility pressure and higher numbers of infection. Monitor the occupancy rate in order to establish a healthy balance between the utilization of hospital resources and general pressure on the facility.
Equipment Utilization
Equipment utilization rate are critical in establishing better asset management processes. It will enable hospital leaders to effectively allocate necessary resources and ensure that the equipment is used for optimal needs. For example, reallocate the spirometer from the area of low utilization rate to the area of higher utilization as the usage fluctuates. Track the equipment utilization to identify where there’s room for improvement such as reallocation of equipment to other areas where is needed the most.
Drug Cost per Stay
Access to patients’ drugs as well as costs is one of the major elements in hospital management, but also healthcare systems as a whole. If the facility is not able to provide relevant medications, patient care will suffer, hospitals will experience budget pressures, and, consequently, a shortage of staff due to budget cuts. That said, this is a medical KPI that needs special attention and continuous monitoring. These insights can help to evaluate future budget allocations, if you expect higher numbers of surgeries, it makes sense to order relevant medications. Monitor the average drug cost per stay as well on the departmental level in order to effectively allocate monetary resources.
Average Treatment Costs
Treatment costs are important metrics to track as they directly impact your finances, the contribution margin you make, and the capacity of your facility to sustain itself. The purpose is not to reduce it as much as possible to make a profit, but to spot abnormal or exaggerated expenses and address them. You can break it down into various categories -per units, per operations, or as in our example, per age groups. By acknowledging these costs, you can also budget better and allow the right amount of money to go to the right category. Calculate the treatment costs according to different categories over time and analyze the evolution.
Cash Flow
The operating cash flow measures the amount of cash generated by a facility’s normal operations. It doesn’t include expenses, revenue drawn from investments, or any other long-term expenditures as it is just focused on core operations. The formula to calculate the OFC is: Operating Cash Flow = EBIT + Depreciation – Taxes – Change in Working Capital. It is a critical metric to track as it indicates whether a company can generate enough cash to sustain its current operations and potential growth. The operating cash flow is often measured as positive or negative. A negative OFC means the facility might need to find temporary sources of funding to be able to pay its staff or buy all the medical supplies it needs to function. Time is a critical factor when it comes to the OFC. If you see that you have a negative cash flow, you need to respond quickly and find improvement opportunities to ensure business continuity.
Profit Margin
It essentially tells you how much money the organization has after subtracting all the expenses (medical supplies, labor costs, payrolls, lease payments, taxes, among others) from the total revenue and it is calculated with the following formula: Net Profit Margin = (Net Income / Revenue) x 100. Just like we saw with the operating cash flow, the NPM is also measured as negative or positive. Naturally, it is important to always keep this number positive, as a negative NPM means the hospital spent more money operating than what is able to recuperate from its operations. A good way to ensure a positive net profit margin is to reduce unnecessary costs and explore new revenue streams.
Turnover Rate
In order to improve the operational efficiency of your hospital, the room turnover rate is one of the hospital metrics that have to be taken into account. When the patient leaves the room, activities such as cleaning, evaluating the equipment, preparing the room for another patient to enter, and changing medical materials all fall under the turnover. The goal is to create a speedy process but ensure quality. This is important as lower quality can cause higher risks of infections and affect numerous other metrics such as costs. To improve the turnover rate, establish a reliable cleaning service, whether in-house or external, that is also sensitive to patient safety and other hospital regulations.
Follow-Up Rate
The patient follow-up rate is one of the healthcare performance metrics that deal with patients’ care after finishing a particular treatment. Treatments include simple check-ups, physical exams, a new prescription, blood tests, or consultations, among others. The follow-up can be done by a physician, nurse, or administrator, e.g., depending on the type of need. That way, the hospital has a better overview of particular departmental performance and, consequently, improves patient outcomes. To successfully guide patients through their recovery process, monitor the follow-up rates by departments, and see what kind of care patients need the most.
Readmission Rate
The hospital readmission rate provides information on the number of patients that return to the hospital within a short period of time after being released. It is one of the most important healthcare metrics as it provides great insight into the quality of care administered in the facility concerned — but cannot be used as a stand-alone quality indicator. Readmission rates can also shed the light on other flaws the hospital management and may help in better cost control as it aims to decrease expensive and unnecessary readmissions. The lowest your readmission rate is, the better. High readmissions point out dysfunctionalities that must be addressed as soon as possible.
Patient Wait Time
Patient wait time is one of the most important aspects of patient contentment. It measures the time it takes for anyone visiting your hospital from when they register to when they see a doctor and get treatment. It can be particularly interesting to measure it in emergency rooms to evaluate how prompt the hospital to deliver urgent services to its patients is. This healthcare metric is highly linked to the patient satisfaction score, as no one really enjoys staying hours in a hospital. It can also reveal some other problems your facility is facing, if the figure is too high, and that needs to be addressed. The lower the wait time is the better. Measuring this type of healthcare KPI permanently is also important so as to identify trends and rush hours on a longer period, and eventually adjust staffing needs for more efficient patient management.
Patient Satisfaction
This is one of the key KPIs that should be a top priority for any healthcare organization, in order to have feedback and improve the service. You can ask your patients how they felt while being taken care of, how they would grade their meals, or how long it took doctors and nurses to explain their situation. Such assessment will provide you insights on the overall perception of your hospital services and show you which points can be improved. Besides, your patients will feel listened to as their opinion and feelings are taken into account, which is another important component of the satisfaction score. The overall patient satisfaction is precisely the healthcare KPI that will attract or on the contrary scare away future patients. The higher it grows, the better it is.
Treatment Error Rate
This indicator measures the number of mistakes made by the clinical staff when providing treatment and it is calculated. Common errors that can be considered in this calculation include prescribing the wrong medication or dosage, diagnosing the wrong disease, and providing the wrong treatment, just to name a few. It is important to monitor this metric carefully as it directly affects patient satisfaction. And not just that, a high treatment error can also lead to an increase in costs from unnecessary readmissions. Take the analysis one step further by looking at the common errors in each facility. This will allow you to implement preventive measures and lower them. Encourage your staff to report errors as a training opportunity instead of a potential punishment.
Patient Safety
The patient safety measures the capacity of a care facility to deliver quality care to its patients and keeping them safe from contracting a new infection, post-operation complications, or any kind of sepsis. It is extremely important to track this metric assiduously to know where problems occur, which stage of the process can be improved, and identify any infection abnormally present in your organization. You can measure this metric and break it down into distinct categories to have an even more accurate view of your development in the matter. This healthcare KPI provides data on the quality of care your hospital delivers. It will give you insights on what must be improved in the different services.
Emergency Room Wait Time
It measures the amount of time between the arrival of a patient in the ER and the moment he or she can see a physician. This number is linked to the average patient wait time, but is more specific as it focuses on the emergency room only. Evaluate this KPI so as to know when the rush hours of the day are and the busiest days of the week, how long are your patients currently waiting and set a target accordingly. Just like for the patient wait time, it may spark light on issues the service is facing and that can become very problematic if not solved. After assessment of the ER wait time on average, you should keep an eye on the evolution of that metric and monitor it over time to see trends, so as to adjust or solve any issue popping up.
Mortality Rate
The patient mortality tracks the number of people who died while being admitted to a health facility. This indicator is critical as it tells you how capable your facility and staff are at stabilizing a patient in critical condition or following operations or procedures. A good way to measure this metric is to divide them by category. Naturally, older patients or others with complicated diseases such as cancer have more possibilities of passing away than others with more treatable conditions. In order to keep your mortality values below the average, you can set up risk scores for the different patient categories and apply preventive measures for each of them.
Staff-to-Patient Ratio
The staff-to-patient ratio indicates whether your staff management processes are effective, meaning whether the hospital is understaffed or overstaffed. Personnel must be available to provide care to all patients, no matter the time of the day, and immediately, if issues arise. Different states have different regulations, but the goal is to provide optimal treatment and ensure each patient is taken care of when needed. Evaluate your staff-to-patient ratio on a regular basis so that you avoid staff fatigue, increase patient satisfaction, and reduce potential errors.
Cancelled/Missed Appointments
This is one of the important key performance indicators for outpatient clinics as well as hospitals, because it directly affects the efficiency of clinicians. If someone doesn’t attend the scheduled appointment, the result is a waste of resources but also the relationship with the physician suffers since one of the consequences includes a violation of trust. Canceled appointments are also affecting the facility’s performance, but, in this case, if canceled promptly, doctors and nurses have the chance to rearrange the schedule and bring another patient in. Measure this value for longer periods so you can address the issues and improve the attendance via reminders or additional calls to patients.
Creating a professional healthcare dashboard is essential for managers to streamline processes and provide added value for hospitals and patients. To succeed in this endeavor, it is important to utilize appropriate tools, specifically healthcare analytics tools, and select relevant metrics for monitoring. Through the consolidation and organization of these components, the development of comprehensive healthcare reports is crucial for maximizing efficiency. Nirmalya Business Intelligence Platform offers a comprehensive suite of analytics solutions tailored for modern enterprises. By leveraging AI-powered predictive and prescriptive analytics alongside role-specific insights, this platform empowers organizations to move beyond basic data analysis and adopt a more analytics-driven approach to decision-making.
Elevate your competitive advantage by utilizing integrated analytics and a comprehensive view of performance. Utilize prebuilt ML models to gain deeper insights into your business, receive informed recommendations, and achieve positive results. This powerful platform offers robust features and seamless integration, empowering organizations to make informed decisions and enhance efficiency throughout their operations. Reach out to us today for further information.
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